Ontario Extend is an Open Educational professional learning micro-credential from eCampusOntario (eCampus Ontario 2020) which helps educators to build on the skills needed for teaching in a digital age. Six modules make up the Empowered Educator framework: Teacher for Learning, Technologist, Collaborator, Curator, Experimenter, and Scholar, each of which has a badge associated with it. Completion of the full range of modules results in a seventh; the Empowered Educator Badge. This conference proposal looks at the planning, rollout, and strategies of Trent Online’s upcoming facilitation of the 2021 Trent Extend mOOC (medium-sized Open Online Course) this spring, as well as the use-value of the badges themselves. Trent Online is inviting participants from across disciplines and institutions and reaching beyond Ontario to include educators around the globe.

Badging programs, particularly Open Education badging, are “verifiable, digital awards, issued to individuals for learning or displaying skills or knowledge, or successfully undertaking a specific task or activity. Badges can also be issued for belonging to a certain group or sharing a common interest” (Henson 2017). Their value in education, specifically Open Education, is in part due to their ability to designate learning pathways, motivate learners to complete their work to gain the badge itself, and serve as an incentive for hesitant learners to sign up in the first place (Borgini 2018, Joseph and McDaniel 2017).

The panel participants are facilitators of the program and serve to mentor and guide those who sign up through the exercises, reflecting upon, and then will submit their work for badges. In addition to asynchronous work, participants will meet with the facilitators in groups to discuss their progress, and the program features a blog and podcast to complement the ongoing learning experiences.

This panel will discuss their work in this initiative thus far as well as guide attendees to view and complete part of the Teacher for Learning module either in real-time or on their own, demonstrating the possibility for this OE program to be used at other institutions or individually for invested educators. The option to tie in a Domain of One’s Own pathway through the modules will also be discussed. Finally, participants are invited to join Trent Online for the mOOC itself in early May.

The Ontario Extend website (https://extend.ecampusontario.ca/) is open to participants as an OER, for anyone to complete or view at any time. The process is documented on the Trent Online blog and podcast here: (http://trentonlineblog.ca)