Volume 20 (2017): Issue 2 (December 2017)

Open badges are a digital representation of skills or accomplishments recorded in a visual symbol that is embedded with verifiable data and evidence. They are created following a defined open standard, so that they can be shared online. Open badges have gained popularity around the world in recent years and have become a standard feature of many learning management systems. This paper presents a systematic literature review of the published open badges literature from 2011 to 2015. Through database searches, searching the internet and chaining from known sources, 135 relevant peer-reviewed papers were identified from a corpus of 247 publications for this review. The authors believe this to be the first effort to systematically review literature relating to open badges. The review categorised publications while also providing quantitative analysis of publications according to publication type, year of publication and contributors. After assessing the literature suggestions for future research directions are presented, based on underrepresented areas.

The aim of this research was to study the differences in social presence and autonomy concerning the two methods of education used in a training program for science teachers in the years 2015-2016. The first method was the traditional face to face and the other was the Distance Education method. In particular, the study focused on whether there are differences in the social presence and autonomy between the two teaching methods, and the teaching experience of the participants. A closed-type questionnaire of Likert type was used to collect the data, while t-test for independent samples was used for statistical analysis. The study indicated differences in the social presence and autonomy between the two methods of teaching.