Month: February 2016

Update: It looks like Pearson have relented and now allowed their badges to be exported out the Acclaim system. Great news!

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Open Badges is a web-native credentialing system. It was incubated by Mozilla and I served on the founding badges team. Since then, stewardship of the project has been given to a spin-out non-profit called the Badge Alliance. I’m currently consulting on areas including Open Badges, meaning that, all told, I’ve been involved in the community for nearly five years.

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You can find out more about Open Badges and how they differ from other digital credentials via the OB101 course.

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There are some big players in the Open Badges space. One of them is Pearson, which you may find surprising. After all, why would an organisation best known for its rapacious business practices (and who some see as standing for everything currently wrong in education) get into the open credentials game?

The answer, of course, is to commodify it. They’ve taken a leaf from Microsoft’s old playbook: Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish. Pearson even have a page on their site explaining how they’re using different terminology just to spread FUD.

Pearson’s badging platform is called Acclaim. They have some big-name partners such as IBM and Citrix. Today, I noticed via the #openbadges hashtag on Twitter that they were singing the praises of the Open Badges ecosystem while pimping their own platform.

There’s nothing particularly wrong with that. Acclaim is technically compatible with the Open Badges Infrastructure (OBI). However, it’s entirely pointless that the badges they issue are Open Badges as users cannot export them from the system elsewhere. Given that Open Badges are portable digital credentials this kind of misses the point.

It’s true that Pearson have engaged with the community on this issue, but their justification seems spurious:

Real-time verification is essential for the clients we work with who are invested in building trust networks with their badge earners and other issuers. We fully expect the market to mature such that services like Mozilla will address this, but until then, we are not offering export / integration.

This is exactly the kind of response you would have found Microsoft giving 15 years ago when attempting to embrace, extend, and extinguish open document formats.

Growing sick of seeing Pearson’s disingenuous tweeting on the #openbadges hashtag, I challenged them today:

https://twitter.com/dajbelshaw/status/697783267253207040

They held the line:

https://twitter.com/YourAcclaim/status/697785850273206273

Note that they don’t care about the spirit of the community or the ethos behind Open Badges, just the cold, hard code. As far as they’re concerned, they’re technically compatible with the OBI, therefore they’re part of the Open Badges community. This logic doesn’t wash with me.

https://twitter.com/dajbelshaw/status/697789569283051520

I’m calling for Pearson to get their act together and allow badges issued via their Acclaim platform to be portable. Credly have the exact same business model as Acclaim, yet their ‘credit’ can be exported to the Mozilla backpack and elsewhere.

If Pearson aren’t willing to allow their badges to be portable, then they should have the guts to stop pretending that they’re interested in the success and sustainability of Open Badges. Muddying the waters doesn’t help anyone except Pearson’s profits.

Parody of Acclaim website thanks to the wonderful X-Ray Goggles