What is a Digital Badge?
A Digital Badge is an indicator of accomplishment or skill that can be displayed, accessed, and verified online. Digital Badges can be earned in a wide variety of environments, an increasing number of which are online. In the education community, these badges provide opportunities to demonstrate professional and personal growth: educators and students who earn digital badges may share them to gain recognition for specific knowledge, accomplishments, or skills acquired through professional learning or coursework completion.
Click on the following links or scroll down to learn more:
- A Brief History Of Digital Badges
- The Open Badge Standard
- The Anatomy Of A Digital Badge
- Open Badge Meta-Data
A (Brief) History Of Digital Badges
Most are familiar with the concept of a physical badge, but digital badges weren’t really on anyone’s radar until around 2011 when Peer 2 Peer University and The Mozilla Foundation co-authored a paper titled “An Open Badge System Framework”. In this paper, a badge was defined as “a symbol or indicator of an accomplishment, skill, quality or interest”. According to the report, badges “have been successfully used to set goals, motivate behaviors, represent achievements and communicate success in many contexts and proposes that, "badges can have a significant impact, and can be used to motivate learning, signify community and signal achievement."
The Open Badge Standard
The Mozilla Foundation would go on to develop an open technical standard called Open Badges in 2011, which served as a common system for issuing, collecting, and displaying digital badges across various websites and non-profit organizations. Contextual information like “what the badge represents, how it was earned, when they earned it, who issued it” is critical to the definition of a badge in this standard.
Find more details on Open Badges at: Open Badges
Open Badges 1.0 was launched in 2012, and by 2013 over 1,450 organizations were issuing badges. The Badge Alliance, a network of organizations and individuals committed to building and advancing Open Badges, was formed in 2014. In 2014, Concentric Sky, and edX partnered to launch Badgr, an open source project to serve as a reference implementation for Open Badges. In 2015 IMS Global Learning Consortium announced their commitment to Open Badges as an interoperable standard for credentials, and later in 2016 it was announced that stewardship of the Open Badge standard itself would officially transition to IMS Global on January 1, 2017.
Find more details on the latest Open Badges Technical Specification at: IMS Global
The Anatomy Of A Digital Badge
In addition to the image-based design we think of as a digital badge, badges have meta-data to communicate details of the badge to anyone wishing to verify it, or learn more about the context of the achievement it signifies. This data should provide all the information needed to understand what the badge signifies: Who received the badge? Who issued the badge? What was the criteria for issuing the badge? Does it expire?
Some or all of this information will be displayed in a visual format wherever the badge is displayed, but it is also stored within the digital badge's meta-data so it can be verified any time - even if you only have the image.
Other information like tags, expiration date, whether or not the credential was revoked are optional fields that may or may not be displayed with the badge image, but will always be included in the meta-data if they are relevant to the badge.
Example Badge (issued using AVID Digital Badging) with meta-data shown. The badge image shown here will contain a copy of all the information on display (issue date, badge name, etc) that can be retrieved later, even without visiting the webpage.
Open Badge Meta-Data
In order for a digital badge to be Open Badge Compliant, it needs to have certain required meta-data:
- Badge Name.
- Badge Criteria (Often written in the description section).
- Badge URL.
- Issue Date.
- Issuer (an account or record associated with the organization issuing the badge - at least their name).
- Recipient (an email or user account associated with the badge owner).
As always, feel free to reach out to AVID Care if you have any questions.