For Youth For Life: 4-H Digital Badges: A Collaborative Tool to Support Informal Learning

Abstract

The intent of FYFL (For Youth For Life) application is to provide an easy to use, cost effective and scalable collaborative system in order to facilitate learning and sharing best practices across communities and institution in line with Computer Supportive Collaborative Work. The proposed research will be designed, developed as a secure collaborative tool that caters issues related to usability and managing groups of the communities of practice to promote motivation for informal learning. The study performs empirical experiment to support adopting For Youth For Life Digital Badges as a unique solution for sharing best practices in the 4-H world. 4-H Digital Badges is an application described as an online skill, quality and accomplishment recognition and validation system. The system supports different populations of users namely youth members, group leaders and different level of administrators (every level having different privileges explained later). The admins utilize this system to create and manage badges, which will be earned by the youth learners by doing substantial amount of work related to that badge. The usability tests and performance results exhibit that the system is intuitive, easy to navigate, and is designed with unconcealed user interface that results in promoting efficient learning and collaboration. The usability tests and performance results were contributory in gauging the efficacy and receptiveness of the designed web-based tool.