Learning now happens everywhere, so how can we recognise this learning? One option is to receive digital badges for completion of learning tasks. Earn for online skills, completing modules or engaging in a community.
Digital Badges
Think back to your childhood, you may have been a scout or guide and been awarded a badge for attaining a proficiency such as knot tying or map reading. This reward provided recognition of an achievement for the person to record and demonstrate they had been assessed and deemed competent in a skill. With the online world increasing in education delivery it is important to recognise achievements. Digital badges are a method of recognition, you can then store them in a digital backpack.
Digital Open Badges are:
- Free and open: “Mozilla Open Badges is not proprietary. It’s free software and an open technical standard any organization can use to create, issue and verify digital badges.
- Transferable: Collect badges from multiple sources, online and off, into a single backpack. Then display your skills and achievements on social networking profiles, job sites, websites and more.
- Stackable: Whether they’re issued by one organization or many, badges can build upon each other and be stacked to tell the full story of your skills and achievements.
- Evidence-based: Open Badges are information-rich. Each badge has important metadata which is hard-coded into the badge image file itself that links back to the issuer, criteria and verifying evidence”.
From MozillaWiki (2014).
Digital Open Badges make it easy to:
- “Get recognition for the things you learn,
- Give recognition for the things you teach,
- Verify skills,
- Display your verified badges across the web”.
From MozillaWiki (2014).
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Creating a Badge
The below references provide a guide to digital badges, and the available resources to create simple digital badges. My experience was to try the free websites and use very simple processes for creating open badges, which you can see above as my first attempt. If I had the coding skills I would like to create, bake and complete a digital badge to share on open access (one for the future).
References
Mozilla (2016). Open Badges
Mozilla Wiki (2014). Badges
European Badge Alliance (2016). Badge Systems
Wikipedia (2016). Digital Badge
Blackall, L. (2015). Displaying ONPhD badges