Gamification of Nursing Education With Digital Badges

Abstract

Digital badges (DBs) serve as an innovative approach to gamifying nursing education by engaging socially connected, technologically savvy nursing students in learning. Because assessment and credentialing mechanisms are housed and managed online, DBs are designed as visible indicators of accomplishment and skill. This article describes important considerations for faculty when incorporating game-based pedagogies such as DB into nursing education and identifies potential pitfalls with DB use that faculty should consider.

The use of digital badges by undergraduate nursing students: A three-year study

“…However, this paper argues that digital badges have a motivational power associated with the type of learner who is motivated to learn new skills or knowledge which is recognised informally (Foli et al, 2016). This article highlights the potential value of digital badges to help personalise learning when they are purposefully integrated into a nursing university teaching topic, adding to recent published work (White and Shellenbarger, 2018).…”

“…However, the use of digital badges in nursing education is just commencing with explorations in micro-credentials (Elliott et al, 2014); motivating students in an online nursing course (Foli et al, 2016); clinical performance and GPA recognition (Hannas, 2016); and recording achievement for future employers (Thomas, 2014). White and Shellenbarger (2018) …”

Can Digital Badging Support an Inclusive New Normal in Higher Education?

“…To date, no study has proposed how or why badging could improve a universities' crisis response. However, many universities in the US and elsewhere have experimented with digital badging [1,11,17,19,29,38,81,78] and evaluated its use in courses in chemistry [16,71], computer information systems [22], software engineering [54] expository writing [31], library management [23,72], nursing [20,64,75], medicine [45,52], and teacher education [10,48]. Some college initiatives focus on developing badged portfolios that capture evidence of students' participation in internships and other co-curricular activities [5,12] Badging solutions can also support lifelong learning [12,25,53] for a wide range of constituents, including informal learners (e.g., participants in non-credit MOOCs [7,19,37]), informal learners attempting to transition to for-credit programs [38], and professional development programs [14,28,55].…”

Developing a digital wound care course for student nurses

“…Although Mayer did not link reward to learning achievement it has been suggested this is a motivator to encourage students to complete learning activities (White and Shellenbarger, 2018). Formative assessment of learning was intended to be varied and interactive (Figure 1), with reward for each part of the course completed leading to the award of an electronic badge and certificate for the student's portfolio.…”