EdTech review: Credly

An excellent and well-made tool shoehorned into an ill-fitting role

In the search for classroom management strategies and tools in the remote learning era, I have come across talks of Credly as a solution for the K-12 classroom.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnV8qRjkjgo

Credly is a digital credential network. Participating businesses and organizations issue digital badges through Credly to recognize verified competency in professional skills. For higher education, this can help translate practical school experiences into skills that potential employers can understand. There are also a few high school programs that offer directly marketable skills, programs like desktop publishing and foreign language mastery. This is where Credly's usefulness in the classroom ends. Credly is a well-designed tool for its intended purpose: verification of professional skills. Unfortunately, Credly is being shoehorned into an ill-fitting role as a gamification reward system. The idea is to use digital badges in the K-12 online classroom to reward students for achieving desired goals or mastering skills. We know this works: Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony have perfected the use of using achievements and trophies to get players to master skills. There are many gamification tools designed for the classroom that use digital achievements and trophies to encourage students to master skills and develop competencies. With all the free and paid tools out there to help gamify the classroom or offer rewards for good behavior, there's no reason to force a tool to do something it's not designed for when you can pick up something off the shelf that is not only designed to do what you want but includes other useful tools as well.