FAQ

What is an Open Badge?

Open Badge is a verifiable, portable digital badge with embedded metadata about skills and achievements. Each badge contains data about skills required to earn the badge and the issuing organization within a portable image file.

• A badge is a digital representation of a skill, learning achievement or experience.
  • Badges can represent competencies and involvements recognized in online or offline life.
  • Each badge is associated with an image and some metadata. The metadata provides information about what the badge represents and the evidence used to support it.
  • Earners can display their badges online and can share badge information through social networks.
• Badges are used to set goals, motivate behaviors and communicate success.
• They can support learning that happens in new ways, in new spaces beyond the traditional classroom, from online courses to after-school programs to work and life experience.
  • This motivates learning and signals achievement across communities and institutions. It also provides a more complete picture of learners' skills, achievements and qualities, which can then be communicated to potential employers, educational organizations and communities.
  • Read more on this dedicated page

What is the difference between digital badges and Open Badges?

Open Badges are digital badges that comply with a technology standard called the Open Badges Specification and are portable across the web. Digital badges that do not comply with the Open Badges Specification may be useable only on the platforms that issue them, for example for website gamification purposes.

What do Open Badges do?

• Badges can capture a wide set of skills and achievements.
• They provide concrete evidence and proof of your skills, achievements and qualities.
• Badges create a more complete representation of an individual's learning and experience.
  • Earners can group badges into collections for sharing through particular channels.
• Badges unlock new career and learning opportunities, potentially allowing employers and other stakeholders to better match individuals to jobs, courses and projects.

Where can I display Open Badges?

You can share your badges anywhere on the web, and also keep them offline if you choose:

• Blogs, websites, ePortfolios, and professional networks
• Job applications
• Social media sites - e.g. LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook
• Email signatures
• Hard disks

How can I display my badge on social media?

LinkedIn

There are two ways: by adding it to the 'Certifications' section of your profile, or by posting to your LinkedIn Feed. Follow the instructions in this post to do either of these.

Facebook, Twitter or other social media

You can share your badges just as you would any other link. The exact procedure depends on where you store your badges, but you should be able to either share a link to:

• A specific badge you've earned
• A collection of badges
• Your profile on a badging platform

Why do we need badges?

In today's world, learning happens anywhere and everywhere. Despite increased opportunities for learning, there’s still an essential piece missing - we need formal recognition for these newly earned and hard-won competencies and skills. One solution is an open badge ecosystem that can help bridge this gap.

What are the benefits of badges?

Badges can:

• Signal achievement - badges signal skills and achievements to peers, potential employers, educational institutions and others.
• Recognize informal learning - earners can get credit and recognition for learning that happens outside of school, for example in after-school programs, work experience or online.
• Transfer learning across spaces and contexts - make skills more portable across jobs, learning environments and places.
• Capture more specific skills than traditional degrees - badges allow a more granular recognition of specific skills than a traditional degree, which is typically a generic representation of a diverse set of learning experiences.
• Support greater specialization and innovation - move faster to support and recognize new skills than traditional degree or certificate programs.
• Allow greater diversity - with specific recognition for "soft skills," social habits, ability to collaborate and so on, badges can measure and recognize skills that are valuable in many contexts but that traditional educational models do not even attempt to quantify.
• Motivate participation and learning outcomes - badges provide feedback, milestones and rewards throughout a course or learning experience, encouraging engagement and retention, as well as reinforcing a sense of achievement.
• Allow multiple pathways to learning - being open and inherently flexible, badges encourage earners to take new paths or spend more time developing specific skills.
• Open doors - Communities of Practice, Professional Associations or Specialized Groups could require obtaining a set of badges to gain access. The verification of these badges could then be automated using the OBI. For this reason badges are used to implement CPD (Continuing Professional Development) in certain industries.
• Unlock privileges - for example, students at a school computer lab might be required to earn a "Digital Safety" badge before being allowed to surf the web.
• Enhance identity and reputation - badges raise the earner's profile with the learning community and peers, giving the individual control over their online identity. The portable nature of badges also allows the earner to aggregate identities across communities.
• Build community and social capital - badges can help earners to find peers or mentors with similar interests. Community badges help formalize camaraderie, team synthesis and communities of practice. The Discover Open Badges project investigated how to enhance the potential of badges to open up learning and careers with badge pathways.
• Capture the learning path and history - with degrees or cumulative grades, much of the learning path (the set of steps and milestones that led to the degree) is lost or hard to see. Badges can capture a more specific set of skills and qualities, dated as they occur along the way using issue dates. This means we can track the set of steps the most successful learners take to gain their skills - and replicate that experience for others. With badge pathways, earners can carve out their own pathways, learning more about their own skill-sets along the way.
• Recognize new skills and literacies - a host of new literacies are critical to success in today's digital world (e.g. appropriating information, judging its quality, multitasking and networking) - these are not typically taught in schools and don't show up on a transcript. Badges can recognize these new skills and literacies.
• Provide a more complete picture of the learner - badges give a more detailed, granular skills and learning history, creating a more representative overview for potential employers, schools, peer groups and others.
• Provide branding opportunities for institutions, organizations and learning communities - badges can be displayed in many locations throughout the Web. Increasing awareness of your institution, organization and learning community, as well as linking relevant curriculum, skills and knowledge.
• Work within various different types of system - badges are open and interoperable, which means stakeholders in a badging system can use whatever technologies they want or need, implementing badging within existing systems and choosing freely to utilize badging in whatever way suits their own community of badge earners.

What kinds of skills and accomplishments can badges represent?

The diversity of skills and experiences Open Badges can represent is a key aspect of their usefulness. Badges can represent skills, competencies, qualities, achievements and interests, including:

• "Hard skills" - e.g. completing a course, mastering a specific programming language or math concept.
• "Soft skills" - e.g. critical thinking, communication or collaboration.
• Community aspects - including reputation and status
• New skills - such as digital literacies.
• Specific, granular accomplishments or activities - for example, leaving helpful comments for other learners, logging into an online learning web site for 10 consecutive days, and so on.
• Anything else - badges are open, so their potential to represent varied skills and experiences is unlimited.

How different are badges from the information we provide in our résumés and CVs?

In general, résumés and CVs are static in that they need to be updated and re-published. Badges can be more dynamic - new skills, competencies and knowledge are automatically published, and updated, after the badge is issued. In other words, badges can represent the same skills and experiences a CV represents, plus a lot more, as well as generally providing a richer level of detail. Badges are also discoverable in a variety of online contexts, so earners can share them in different ways.

Who can issue badges?

Badges can be created, defined and issued by a number of sources, including:

• Traditional educational institutions (e.g. Cornell University, The University of California or Colby College)
• Professional bodies (e.g. doctors, engineers, accountants)
• International credential assessment agencies
• Non formal, community learning organizations (e.g. Adult Basic Education, Literacy, Employability)
• Other community organizers (e.g. voluntary groups, event organizers)
• Communities of practice (e.g. open education projects, peer learners, or the individual learners themselves)
• After-school programs and learning networks
• Online courses and open courseware initiatives
• Government agencies and other public sector bodies (e.g. NASA, libraries, museums)
• Employers

Can I issue a badge to a group?

You can issue a badge to any entity with an email address. However, a badge is issued to an individual and the assignment is based upon their email address. When you create a badge and make it available, you can decide whether it should be unique or whether it can be issued to multiple earners.

What are the different types and levels of badges?

Badge levels and types can be configure by issuers to suit the needs of their own communities. In general:

• "Smaller" badges can be used for motivation and feedback, tied to smaller behaviors or achievements. (Like those you may have seen on online forums).
• "Larger" badges can be used for certification purposes. Endorsed by specific organizations or other authorities, with more rigorous or defined assessments. These types of badges are used in CPD (Continuing Professional Development) situations.
• Basic or foundational badges can provide the core or entry-level framework for acquiring skills.
• Intermediate and expert level badges can provide the pathways and milestones to guide learners through to mastery.
• Lower level badges may be required as pre-requisites to unlock higher level badges, much as we have seen in various gaming environments.
• These requirements can be made explicit through documented pathways and instructions, providing learners with a roadmap toward mastery. The Discover Open Badges project developed the concept of Open Badge pathways to facilitate this process.
• "Stealth assessment" approach can involve particular actions or accomplishments suddenly unlocking higher levels, making learners more aware of their progress and motivating engagement.
• Multiple badges can be aggregated into higher-level "meta badges" that represent more complex literacies or competencies. These meta-badges can be created and issued by organizations to target specific sets of skills and to signal general mastery.
• Life-long learner badges that show a continuous growth and mastery within a subject domain where new levels are added via length of commitment, increasing competency or life-time achievement.

You can issue a badge to anyone for anything. However, this kind of simple taxonomy is often useful in getting people started:

What kind of badge system designs exist? Where do we start when designing badge systems?

Badge systems have already been designed and implemented by a host of organizations as you can see from the list of participating issuers. To find out more about implementing badging systems, get involved with the Open Badges Community.

What are the key components of a successful badge system?

The key elements of an Open Badge system for connected learning are:

1. Badges
   • images and metadata assertions
2. Assessment
   • the ability for reviewers to assess badge applications and make issuing decisions
3. Collecting and Sharing tools
4. Criteria & Evidence
   • links to these can be built into the metadata for a badge.

What are badge pathways?

Badge pathways are an evolving concept that can be defined as digital solutions that enable individuals to use digital badges to move towards a goal or opportunity, or that can be used as an 'infographic' to document an individual's pathway towards a certain goal, with badges.

Discover Open Badges was the first project to research the concept of Open Badge based pathways^{[1] [2] [3] [4]}. Run by Mozilla, the project took place in 2013-2014 and received funding from the Gates Foundation to explore tools, processes and potential specifications for badge-based pathways to employment. The project's research and development was tailored for a target audience of underprivileged youth of secondary school age, focusing on how badge-based pathways could connect and enhance this demographic's access to employment opportunities^{[5] [6]}.

The project developed:

• A Minimal Viable Product (MVP) prototype digital tool to enable employers to set out competency based pathways to jobs in their industry and learners to embark upon those pathways using badges to demonstrate the required competencies. The MVP used a mobile first approach
• Processes and structural solutions to allow the evidencing of certified skills, applied skills, as well as more intangible skills such as character attributes like curiosity and agency
• Sample badges and open assessment criteria to evidence skills required to complete badge-based pathways^[7]
• Additionally the project conducted research on the factors affecting uptake of employment and other positive life opportunities by youth from disadvantaged backgrounds, and how badge-based pathway interventions could be developed in order to increase engagement with these^[8]

More infomation can be found on the badge pathways page.

How is the value of the badges authenticated?

In this system, a digital badge is more than just an image – it is essentially a collection of metadata that fully explains the badge and includes information such as the issuer, issue date, criteria for earning the badge, expiration, evidence and so on. The badge acts as a gateway or conversation starter, but the bulk of the information is in the metadata and it can act as an informal validation system itself.

Further, the Open Badge Infrastructure includes an authentication channel so that whenever someone tries to use or share a badge, the displayer can call back to the issuer and confirm that the issuer in fact issued this badge to this user (and that it is still valid). If the issuer responds positively, the badge is authenticated/validated, otherwise the badge is non-validated and therefore will most likely not be accepted or used.

Do badges expire?

It will depend on the individual badge. Issuers can set expiration dates with each badge that they issue and that information will be carried with the badge. Issuers might choose to do so for skills that need to be refreshed or are quickly outdated. Through the Open Badge Infrastructure, when someone tries to use or share a badge that has expired, the Open Badges infrastructure conveys that the badge is expired.

How can earners manage their badges for different uses and audiences?

• Badge value increases as learners gain control over how badges are displayed for different audiences and contexts.
• Learners can create groups of badges through their profiles and control which collections are available to different audiences. For example, you may want to display one set of badges for your peers, but another set for a specific potential employer.
• Learners can also add badges to any external website or environment that supports badge display. These include personal websites, blogs, and social networking environments such as , Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook.

Can I see the tech behind all of this?

Absolutely.

• Documentation
• Source Code