Open Badges Blog

Learning today happens everywhere. Open Badges makes is possible to recognize and showcase your skills & literacies across the Web. Learn more at openbadges.org.

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Official publication channel of the BA: Advancing Open Badges standard and practice

The official publications of the Badge Alliance are switching platforms, over to this collection on Medium. The Tumblr you are reading will remain up for archival purposes. Thanks for following, everyone!

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Now the quick badger jumps over the lazy fox

An issuer organization decides to start a badge program, so its staff members design a badge system to go with the program's content delivery and assessment practices. Then they run badge software to issue badges to recipients. 

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Badge Alliance FAQ - July 2015

There’s so much we want to say -- we can’t put it all into an over-long announcement. Here is a growing list of some of the top questions:

What’s happening to the Badge Alliance?

The Badge Alliance is responding to the community’s evolving needs and adapting to focus more closely on the Open Badges Standard and organizing direct cooperation between Alliance members whose success the Standard depends on. Nate Otto is taking on the responsibility of leading the BA as it makes this transition. The BA aims to remain a strong informational resource and a place to organize collaboration and discussion between community members.

Will all of the 2014 working groups continue?

The BA is a the best place to connect to the conversations happening in the world of badges, but it should not be the only place where conversations happen. Most of the call series that started in BA working groups in 2014 will not be reestablished within the BA formally, but for any of these groups and topic area that wants to restart regular calls, we can develop a plan and the infrastructure to make it happen. For example, Dan Hickey, James Willis, and Carla Casilli are continuing the Open Badges in Higher Education working group, which kicked off its new call series July 7, with fortnightly calls already lined up for Tuesdays at Noon US Eastern. Other topic area interest groups have already started organizing, led by individuals and organizations dedicated to making badges work within their niches. A great example is the Open Badges for Teacher Professional Development consortium led by Ben Roome (BadgeList/Knowledgestreem) and Sarah Blattner (Tamritz). We recognize that many of these conversations are best distributed across the ecosystem, not centralized in one organization, and will support those interest groups with central coordination when needed.

Will the Community Calls continue?

Yes, same badge time, same badge channel. This call has been a great resource for the badges community over the years to stay checked in. Nate Otto will take over moderating the weekly community calls and welcomes feedback and suggestions about how to use this space to best serve the community.

What’s happening with the original Badge Alliance team?

It has always been the intention to make the Badge Alliance entity as streamlined and easily sustainable as possible, so that we can spend less time raising money to cover operations, and more to feedback into the ecosystem. Additionally, with a new scoped focus on the Open Badges Standard, we felt we needed more technical leadership. For those reasons, we're transitioning the BA to a new, smaller core team led by Nate Otto. The original team will continue to contribute as community members, as well as through their own projects including Badge Labs and IMS Global.

When will I hear more?

Stay tuned to this, the Open Badges blog, BadgeAlliance.org, and the weekly community calls for more announcements and opportunities to ask questions or provide feedback.

What about the Cities of Learning?

The Cities of Learning program and its use case for Open Badges will continue to be improved and supported, including with the forthcoming release of a revamped badge-enabled platform that organizes learning. Look for more announcements about the Cities coming out over the summer and early fall as well as opportunities to sign your city up for summer 2017.

Nate is an employee of Concentric Sky. Won’t there be conflict of interest with Concentric Sky driving a neutral body like the BA since they have businesses interests around open badges and interest involved?

Much of the work of the next phase of building co-existing badge-enabled systems and services will be performed by member organizations of the BA, like Concentric Sky. Through the Standard Working Group charter and communication channels facilitated by the BA, all of these organizations will have a consensus-based process to guide the Open Badges specification and ecosystem forward in ways that seek to lift all boats as opposed to providing any commercial advantage to particular Alliance partners. Representatives from other commercial organizations working with Open Badges are likely to fill leadership roles and responsibilities in the future. As part of their responsibilities to the communities, representatives to the BA from these organizations will be asked to maintain a spirit of open cooperation, disclose their interests when relevant, and not take advantage of official roles within the BA to direct advantages to any particular organization. Questions, comments, and concerns are welcome in order to build the most effective and accessible BA possible.

Will the Badge Alliance be up to full speed right away?

No. Thanks for your patience as we work out the kinks, clean up loose ends, and get started on new initiatives. Our core regular programs, like the community call will have no interruption during the transition period, but it may take a little bit longer to get answers to questions and specific help as we finalize staffing for 2015-16.

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The Badge Alliance in 2015

2014 was a great building year for the badges ecosystem and the Badge Alliance (BA) network, and 2015 has been an exciting year so far. Rooms are overflowing for badging-related presentations at conferences around the world, more compelling use cases are popping up all the time, and the level of understanding and conversation about badges is far higher than two years ago. While the Badge Alliance has played a pivotal role in this progress, much of the work has come from the community itself.

The BA was created to grow the community and seat the ownership and accountability of the badging work in the ecosystem that was using badges. We’ve accomplished that - the BA has grown, with hundreds of organizations pledging to work together to issue and understand Open Badges. The first year of the BA's investigation, community-building, and outreach provided us with a better understanding of the state of badges in the world, and connected a vibrant community around collaborating to use a shared technology. The momentum behind Open Badges has never been stronger.

Our initial efforts also revealed that there are still significant barriers to implementation and to achieving the community’s goals for Open Badges usability and impact. Over the last year, we discovered that the network is large and diverse, and that it is positioned to continue to diversify in multiple dimensions. It became clear that it is more important than ever for the BA to redouble its efforts on maintaining and improving badges technology and interoperability to make Open Badges the best way to recognize, capture, and communicate learning across all contexts.

With this analysis, we’ve decided to rescope the BA’s priorities and focus on the areas where the BA’s contribution to the community is most needed. Based on all of the foundational work that has been done to-date, it's evident that zeroing in on the Open Badges Standard and the community around it is critical for accelerating adoption and realizing mainstream acceptance of open badges..

The BA is bringing on Nate Otto of Concentric Sky as its new Interim Director to help make this shift, drawing on his technical background and deep familiarity with the badges ecosystem to capitalize on the momentum that has built over the last 16 months. Nate will oversee the new BA focused on the Open Badges Standard, as well as other priorities as identified by the community. Nate is working with the founding Badge Alliance team to collect community feedback about priorities, and we welcome any additional thoughts community members have about this shift.

Erin Knight, Founding Executive Director, Badge Alliance Nate Otto, Interim Director, Badge Alliance

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bananigans:

I’m excited to share with you all the work we’ve been devoting ourselves to in the Badge Alliance Standard Working Group over the past several months. We are releasing the latest Open Badges v1.1 specification today. Yay!!!!

Details here: https://openbadgespec.org

This work...

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New IMS Digital Credentialing Initiative

Today is an exciting day for the open badges community! IMS Global, the leading education technology standards body, announced that they are kicking off a new IMS Digital Credentialing initiative.

In case you are unaware, IMS Global is a nonprofit membership organization that advances technology that can affordably scale and improve educational participation and attainment by collaborating on interoperability and adoption initiatives. Check out the IMS website for more information.

The new IMS Digital Credentialing initiative will be focused on furthering the adoption, integration and transferability of digital credentials, within institutions, schools, and corporations. The initial aim of IMS Digital Credentialing will be to further investigate and expand the reach, adoption and value of open badges in several potential ways, including: badge integration in the IMS eT work already underway, Open Badge Standard extension work, and exploration of new models of badge system design, storage, usage, or evaluation.

“This is exciting news for the open badging work, which was incubated initially at Mozilla Foundation and then expanded upon at the Badge Alliance,” according to Erin Knight, Executive Director of the Badge Alliance. “We've been working for years to get the kind of access and influence that IMS can bring to the table, and now we can focus on building the necessary extensions and/or new standards needed to make badges usable and valuable to institutions and employers across the world.”

Check out Erin’s blog post to learn more about the natural evolution of this exciting new initiative and what it means for the open badges community.

For more information on the new IMS Digital Credentialing initiative, check out the press release here.

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Open Badges Community Call, April 8, 2015

Agenda: http://bit.ly/CC15_April8

Audio: http://bit.ly/CC15_April8audio

This week we dived into a discussion on soft skills and workforce development, led by those who kickstarted a conversation last week. We also heard from Alan Reid of Coastal Carolina University, where he developed an online program in which students earn performance-based digital badges in their first-year writing courses - http://ccc.coastal.edu/. They were able to successfully convince the college to recognize badges as a legitimate credit hour - that’s a pretty huge deal in the formal education space! 

Now, the ENGL courses that were traditionally 3 credit hours have become 4 credit hour courses, with the fourth hour defined as students' demonstrated ability to earn the digital badges (each badge takes students roughly 1-1.5 hours to complete). Obviously, this had a large impact on the rest of the university, shifting entire programmatic curriculums, as well as affecting financial aid and tuition schedules. They began the program last August, and so far, we have had an overwhelmingly positive response.

Read the full discussion here.

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People have been talking about a crossover between Open Badges and Tin Can (xAPI) since 2012. Blogs have been written, ideas shared and there’s even a Twitter account that got set up at one point! Nobody has actually come to the point of defining the details of how it would all work though. Until now. Today, we published an xAPI Open Badges recipe to the Registry. This recipe is the work of the xAPI Open Badges working group including people from both the Open Badges and Tin Can communities. The recipe has also been published on openbadges.org and uses openbadges.org identifiers; this is a real collaboration of both specification groups.

Exciting developments in the integration of Tin Can (xAPI) and Open Badges! Click the link above to read the full blog post from Andrew Downes.

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Open Badges Community Call, March 25, 2015

Agenda: http://bit.ly/CC15_March25

Audio: http://bit.ly/CC15_March25_audio

This week we heard from the folks at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, who invited BA Executive Director Erin Knight to an event back in January which explored innovations in workforce preparation with an emphasis on digital badging. It focused on new research linking specific work-ready (“soft”) skills to workforce outcomes and explore digital badging as a potential strategy for credentialing these skills. Various stakeholders contributed to the discussions, including young adults, workforce organizations, non-profits, and private industry representatives.

Christine Capota and Chris Shannon spoke about the event and ongoing conversations happening in and around Boston about employer acceptance of badges, which will depend on two things, according to Capota and Shannon: conceptual acceptance, and technological acceptance. Regulation and quality control will help with the former, and technology options that make the badge evaluation process easier will help with the latter.

“What makes badging with workforce unique is that it's not a contained environment,” they said. “Badges are a currency within a certain environment but from a global comprehension perspective, they appear to be difficult to parse.”

Read the full discussion here.

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Will #OpenBadges Remain Open? That is up to us.

Will Open Badges remain open? That is up to us.

Dr. Bernard Bull shared his thoughts on a recent critique presented by Dr. Michael Olneck at the pre-conference event on Open Badges at the Learning Analytics 2015 Conference:

There is democratizing technology and authoritarian technology. I’ve written about that in the past. However, there is more than one way to approach this. You can look at the technology itself, its inherent features and how they are likely to lead one toward more authoritarian or democratizing structures. That, for example, is present in debates about gun control. Some argue that guns, by their nature, are designed to shoot things, including people. As such, people might push for more regulation and control around them, resulting in a more authoritarian ecosystem within which guns reside. Others look at the social landscape and argue that there are plenty of examples where guns are present, but violence with guns is low or absent. They are not necessarily looking at the affordances and limitations of the technology directly, but they are instead examining how it developed in a give context. As a result of their approach, they may argue for maintaining a larger democratizing ecosystem for the technology of guns. In reality, both of these factors are constantly at work with the assimilation of a technology in a new context. There are inherent affordances and limitations to the technology that make some things possible and other things more likely. At the same time, there are complex individual and societal forces that impact how it develops, especially the power structures that develop alongside a given technology.

Read the piece in full by clicking the link above.

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Open Badges Community Call, March 18, 2015

Agenda: http://bit.ly/CC15_March18

Audio: http://bit.ly/CC15_March18audio

This week the panelists from last week’s SXSWedu session on global lessons in open badges shared their experiences with the community:

Kate Coleman, of Deakin University, said “we need to start talking about new models of learning, education and business models rather than retro-fitting to realise the potential of the disruption” - an interesting stance, as Carla pointed out, as we often hear that "retrofitting is a requirement for adoption and growth,” perhaps indicating that Australia is ahead of other countries in pushing badges forward;

Tim Riches, of Digital Me, said that various trust models for badges are emerging, and this year will bring "proof points emerg[ing] around conneting badge earners to work experience / employment opportunities”

Serge Ravet, of Badge Europe, shared concerns about the fragmentation in thought and discourse that comes from talking about “micro-credentials” (something echoed in a 2013 blog post by Carla Casilli). He also brought up the distinction and potential confusion around trust and security: “‘security’ is embedded in 'trust', but once trust diminishes, 'security' becomes external; trust is free, security without trust has a cost, hence there is a business model for security without trust, a more open one for "open trust."”

Follow the rest of the conversation by clicking the links above for the discussion notes and audio recording.

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Carla Casilli | Open Badge Opticks : The prismatic value of badges

Our Director of Policy + Practice, Carla Casilli, wrote a thought-provoking piece inspired by a recent Twitter conversation about the future of education and the role of badges:

During a recent Twitter foray, I jumped into an ongoing conversation about where education is headed and the role that badges might play in where education is headed. The discussion stemmed from Kevin Carey‘s insightful and provocative NYTimes article, “Here’s What Will Truly Change Higher Education: Online Degrees That Are Seen As Official” (based on an excerpt from The End of College.) During that Twitter exchange, Anya Kamenetz (who has recently written The Test) was commenting on Carey’s book and mentioned that she felt that badges have been operating in—and will continue to operate in—perpetual beta. When I asked her why she felt this to be true, she tweeted, “I don’t see the value.” I tweeted back saying that badge value was prismatic. This post is an exploration of that position.

Read the full post here.

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Badger Beats: The Week In Review [80]

Apologies for the delay on last week’s Badger Beats, everyone! 

Here’s a brief summary of what we read, did, and talked about last week:

At SXSWedu, lots of folks were talking about badges with Kate Coleman, Serge Ravet, Tim Riches and Mark Riches during “Badge the World: Global Lessons in Open Badging”;

While SXSWedu was generating lots of great conversation and debate, the DML Trust Challenge winners were announced - including two badging proposals! See more here;

The Chronicle of Higher Education published a piece on three big topics being covered at this year’s SXSWedu, including badges and other alternative credentials, student privacy, and digital tools for instructors;

On the community call, Megan Cole led a discussion on the Carnegie Report on the Credit Hour - see the call summary here;

Kevin Carey’s new book, The End Of College, sparked an interesting opinion piece on Inside Higher Ed by John Warner: Can We End 'The End of College' Already?

Joshua Kim looked into the future in his piece for Inside Higher Ed: Uber, Badging and Higher Ed;

Open Badges got a shout-out from Rands in a piece on the toxicity of titles in the workplace;

Friday was also Red Nose Day in the UK - a nationwide fundraising day for Comic Relief who help families in the UK and Africa - and Makewaves were awarding badges to young people participating in the day’s activities! Watch a video about Red Nose Day 2015 here.

Thanks for yet another great week - let’s see what you’ve got this week!

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Open Badges Community Call, March 11, 2015

Agenda: http://bit.ly/CC15_March11

This week the team and community looked at the recent report from the Carnegie Foundation on the Credit Hour (download the report here).

The report, as reviewed by Inside Higher Ed, argues that “the credit hour is an inadequate unit for measuring student learning. Yet no better replacement for higher education’s gold standard has emerged, and getting rid of it right now would be risky.” We asked our community to weigh in on our discussion board, and you can follow that thread here: http://bit.ly/OB_CarnegieReport

We continued this conversation on this week’s community call, where a number of attendees echoed some of the IHE commentary, that “the credit hour is a measure of instruction, not a measure of learning,” but, as Carla Casilli eloquently put, it “is *the* archetypal measurement tool for education today” and simply removing it would indeed be risky, creating a vacuum that currently can’t be adequately filled by alternative credentials or assessment methods.

Others, including Nate Otto, talked about the role badges could play in this future space. The fact that “transcripts are hard to translate” is known by many employers who have echoed these sentiments about GPAs, letter grades and transcripts. Those working on open badges software are hoping to find ways to translate value using badges, creating networks of trust across education and the workforce.

Follow the discussion notes from the call here: http://bit.ly/CC15_March11

Thank you to those who participated on this week’s call. Join us next Wednesday at 12pm ET to learn more about our community’s badging projects and share updates from your own.

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Last Wednesday, March 4, Nesta and the Scout Association launch the new Digital Maker badge - bringing digital making skills to their network of 400,000 young people across the UK with a focus on creativity through computational thinking.

The new badge

Nesta believes that digital creativity, along with other digital making skills, are not only important skills for future jobs and personal agency in an increasingly digital world, but also fun to learn outside of the classroom.

After consultation and testing with The Scout Association, volunteers, youth members and technology experts, Nesta has developed resource packs to help Scouts achieve the Digital Maker Staged Activity Badge, at stages 1 and 2. Packs are accessible from the Nesta partnership page of the Scouts website as PDFs and are designed to be a fun introduction to how technologies work, including technologies that can be tried at home. A great example is 'Sandwich Bot' - how to program your scout leader to make a jam sandwich.

Read the full story by clicking the link above.

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Badger Beats: The Week In Review [79]

Hey there, badgers! Here's your weekly run-down of projects, updates and articles for the open badges community:

We heard from Matt Rogers of Digital Me on this week's community call, and he shared some of the recent work they’ve been doing in the UK - the audio and summary are here;

Serge Ravet responded to a question posed by Kate Coleman about ePortfolios and Open Badges - read his blog post here;

Michael Robbins wrote about necessary changes schools must make to "fully realize the potential of the digital learning revolution" - including the integration of badges into credentialing systems;

The New York Times adapted Kevin Carey's essay “The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere,” in a piece titled Here’s What Will Truly Change Higher Education: Online Degrees That Are Seen as Official;

Exciting news from the UK: Nesta and the Scouts Association launched the new Digital Maker badge this week, bringing digital making skills to their network of 400,000 young people;

The Chronicle of Higher Education asks if badges can help graduates access more jobs than bachelor's degrees (article is accessible to subscribers only);

Pearson’s Acclaim platform gets a spotlight in this BBC article on CV / résumé fraud:

Over on Forbes, James Marshall Crotty wrote a piece titled "Education Is The Answer To Income Inequality: Part One" - looking forward to the next installment!

Going to SXSWedu?

If you're heading to Austin for SXSWedu, don't forget to check out Badge the World: Global Lessons in Open Badging with Kate Coleman, Serge Ravet, Tim Riches and Mark Riches. It's going to be great!

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Open Badges Community Call, March 4, 2015

Audio: http://bit.ly/CC15_March4_audio

Agenda: http://bit.ly/CC15_March4

This week we were joined by Matt Rogers from Digital Me, who shared some of the recent work they've been doing in the UK, including professional development badges for computing curricula in partnership with NAACE (National Association of Advisors for Computers in Education). 

Safe-Bots for Internet Safety

Digital Me and telecommunications company O2 recently led a campaign around Safer Internet Day on February 10th, encouraging youth to take leadership within their families and communities. Youth participants made Safe-Bots displaying e-safety messages at 87 core locations around the UK, including O2 stores. The SID activities were mapped at safebot.co.uk to educate youth about geolocation data and tracking.

Participants earned badges for a range of activities using the Makewaves platform; those younger than 13 could create a 'family backpack' using parents' emails, and convert them to open badges once they reach 13 and send them to a Mozilla Backpack.

Lucy Neale from Digital Me added that the Internet safety badges "are also designed as a way to engage parents with e-safety as this is something schools and corporates like O2 are struggling with." E-safety is still seen as a taboo subject for many parents, who perhaps lack an understanding of the issues or feel it is irrelevant. "This project is designed to test whether the badges and digital making activities can offer a non-threatening opportunity for parents to engage with the topic, led by their children, in neutral spaces, including at home and in O2 shops and other public spaces."

Click here for initial statistics and here for SID participation information. Teachers can download a free SID resource pack, available at www.makewav.es/safe, from the resource tab on the left hand side. You can read more about the SID Safe-Bot activities on the O2 blog.

Check out the SID promotional film here: http://bit.ly/SID_film

Thanks to Matt for telling us more about Digital Me's leadership in SID activities for UK youth; we look forward to hearing more about other projects on upcoming calls.

Join us next Wednesday for more community updates and announcements - click here for weekly call information.

Request for comment on Standards doc

The Standards Working Group shared their collaborative document on open credentials use cases, which is now open for community feedback: http://bit.ly/Standards_UseCases