After spending several years honing my instructional skills in the high school classroom, I wanted to further my own education and sought to explore methods for motivating and engaging learners. With this in mind, my Ph.D. research focused on teen mother book groups that used literature as a means to help participants consider and connect aspects of the literature to their own lives. The book group environment was inspiring, nurturing, and supportive and provided the young women with the affirmation that was so necessary to help them see themselves as highly capable readers who could in turn provide a literary-rich atmosphere for their children. As a book group leader, I was able to see first-hand that when learners were acknowledged for their growth and capabilities, they become highly motivated and eager to continue their development.

My research informed my work as a Professor of Education- responsible for guiding pre-service and practicing teachers to discover their own ways to design curriculum that would lend itself to forming engaging learning environments for their students. A major part of designing these types of settings had to include ways to recognize K-12 students appropriately for their ongoing skill development. I was always inspired by how the military and cub scouts were able to devise a comprehensive system for encouraging their stakeholders to build on their existing knowledge and skill sets towards mastery by providing a very public way to celebrate ongoing success. Their recipients literally wear their accomplishments as badges on their chests. At the same time, social media was becoming more and more pervasive, and opportunities for learning online were more becoming more widely available. I was very curious about the intersection between the desire of people to share their accomplishments with their networks on social media and learners’ acceptance of embracing online courses as a viable and convenient way to learn.

As it so happened, at the same time I also came across Mozilla Open Badges as an interesting framework for recognizing student learning. To me, this was the perfect storm. I was fascinated about the massive potential of digital badging to become a key currency for recognizing learning pathways. While Open Badges was conceived for K-12 students, I saw even more utility and promise in the professional development space. With this in mind, I decided to take the leap from educator to technology entrepreneur, and in partnership with my husband’s software development company, I applied all of my prior experiences and expertise to develop an end-to-end solution for digital recognition. And thus, BadgeCert was born.