This paper investigates high school students' perceptions of the opportunities and challenges of using digital badges to recognize and reward the skills and achievements they acquire in an afterschool science education program. Focus groups and usability tests were conducted with 10 students during the design of a badge system prototype for use in the program. We found that students recognized opportunities for personal empowerment in their use of badges, but also expressed concerns about sharing badges in various online contexts. The findings provide new insight into the values and goals that learners bring to discussions of digital badges in education. These insights hold relevance for designers of education-based badge systems as well as educators seeking to introduce badges into their practice.

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This study explored how Australian music technology courses teach employability skills. A curriculum mapping of 63 undergraduate courses was conducted with course learning outcomes aligned against two benchmarks. The first benchmark was the Ten Skills for the Future Workforce which identifies key employability skills graduates will require in the coming decade. The second benchmark was the Australian Qualifications Framework Specification for the Bachelor Degree which defines the generic skills graduates must obtain through Australian Bachelor Degrees. This curriculum mapping reveals that Australian music technology courses teach Novel and Adaptive Thinking, Computational Thinking, New Media Literacy, and Design Mindsets universally. However, this curriculum mapping also reveals a deficit in employability skills related to Cross-Cultural Competency, Transdisciplinarity, Virtual Collaboration, and Collaboration more generally. The implications of this mapping is that Australian music technology educators seem to be prioritizing specific technical and creative skills over higher-order applications of skills and knowledge which are contextualized in their broader social and cultural contexts. Finally, this article shows how curriculum mapping can be implemented to embed employability skills progressively across a program sequence using a case study from the School of Music, University of Queensland.