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Where to look for information around Open Badges and digital credentials (July 2024 edition)

Posted on by Doug Belshaw
Hexagons looking a bit like badges (or a beehive)

Someone got in touch with me recently to ask for some advice after listening to the episode on Open Badges I recorded with Matt Linaker for the Totara Talks Talent podcast. It’s been a few years since they were up to speed around badges and digital credentials, and so wanted some recommendations on some resources to get them up to speed.

Instead of keeping such recommendations in the silo of an email inbox, I thought I’d share them here. I’m sure I’ve missed something, but the context of the advice is a 12-month badges pilot at a higher education institution in North America.

WAO resources

It would be remiss of me not to point first of all towards the resources that we are WAO have produced over the years. These are many and varied, but I’d first direct people’s attention towards the following.

Blog posts

Other stuff

  • Badges.community — information about a Community of Practice called ORE (Open Recognition is for Everybody) which meets monthly and discusses all things badge- and recognition-related.
  • Badge Wiki — a knowledge repository for the Open Badges community, including badge platforms, a glossary, the Open Recognition Toolkit, and a lot more.
  • Reframing Recognition — a free email-based course to think about going beyond microcredentials towards a more holistic notion of open recognition.

We’re also working on a free online resource that puts together a lot of the fantastic images that Bryan Mathers has created around Open Badges over the years. It’s not finished yet, but you can have a sneak peek here.

WAO Partners

We’ve worked with Participate a lot over the past few years, and more recently the Digital Credentials Consortium (DCC) based at MIT. Something to bear in mind is that version 3 of the Open Badges specification introduces some interesting new features, as it uses the Verifiable Credentials data model. One of these is ‘decentralised identifiers’ meaning that badges are issued to wallets rather than email addresses. For example:

We helped the DCC set up a new knowledge base which has a lot of interesting and useful information about everything related to this. The DCC creates Open Source software to help higher education institutions, vendors, and anyone else be able to issue Verifiable Credentials at scale.

People to follow

This is where I get into trouble by accidentally leaving people out, but with that risk in mind here are some people to follow who are active on LinkedIn, posting mainly in English and mostly about things somehow related to badges and digital credentials:

Events to attend

Other things

Although the best thing to do is to “get into the water” by following a bunch of people and keeping up to date with what they share, it might be specifically worth following what’s going on around skills-based hiring at the moment. Walmart is funding a bunch of things in this area, including work by Jobs for the Future (JFF). For example, we’ve just kicked off a project with them around evaluating a credential for job readiness.

There’s a lot going on! This post could have have been five times longer, and it makes me think that perhaps we should resurrect Badge News 🤔

Image CC BY-ND Visual Thinkery for WAO

Levelling up?

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

I’ve spent 13 years now interested in Open Badges and, more recently, Verifiable Credentials.* When you explain something over and over again you get better at explaining it. You also start to notice patterns. This post is about one of those patterns.

* Happily, v3.0 of the Open Badges specification uses the Verifiable Credentials data model. Find out more.

Define something worth learning, build a curriculum and scheme of work, then design some learning activities. Create an assessment based on the learning activities, and then issue credentials based on the outcome of the activities.
Image CC BY-NC Visual Thinkery

In broad brushstrokes, credentials are awarded in a similar way within academic systems. Define something worth learning, build a curriculum and scheme of work, then design some learning activities. Create an assessment based on the learning activities, and then issue credentials based on the outcome of the activities.

We’re so used to this that we forget that this is very far removed from how the world actually works. Learning outside of the classroom is messy, episodic, and relational. So how do we go about capturing this?

A common mental model I’ve seen is using gold, silver, and bronze as ‘tiers’ within a badging system. However, without a background in assessment design, these tiers often become even more arbitrary than those in formal education. There’s often a huge ask even to get on the bottom rung of the ladder. Why? I’d just give people badges for turning up. They’re free! You can issue as many as you like.

At Mozilla, where I also served as Web Literacy Lead, we aimed to link the Web Literacy Map to badges, and initially considered levels. However, we quickly realised that doing this globally in a decentralised way is essentially impossible. Instead, mapping badges to skills in specific areas made much more sense. Context matters: what might be ‘advanced’ in one place could be ‘beginner’ elsewhere.

Instead, mapping badges related to skills in a particular area made much more sense. Context does, after all, matter: what might be seen as ‘advanced’ somewhere might be seen as ‘beginner’ elsewhere, and vice-versa. Badges for levels are all well and good, but those levels need to describe something worthwhile.

After leaving Mozilla, I spent all my consultancy time with City & Guilds , collaborating extensively with Bryan Mathers (who created the images in this post). Even as an awarding body, it took City & Guilds staff a while to grasp all the possibilities badges offered.

Image CC BY-NC Visual Thinkery

Bryan created this super-simple taxonomy from our conversations as a conversation starter with City & Guilds staff, helping them realise that recognition in the form of participation in something, or membership of a thing, was just as legitimate as reaching a defined standard or demonstrating excellence. Badges help us tell a story about the learning journey we’ve been on.

For me, this has been one of the main takeaways from my own learning journey with Open Badges so far: when you’ve got enough verified ways of showing what you’ve done, levels don’t matter that much. We’re all different, so recognising and celebrating that is, to me, more important than expecting everyone to fit into pre-defined boxes.

So if you’re designing assessments based on academic research for something that’s high stakes then, by all means, design a rigorous system. For everything else, treat it like a product: figure out how your users (the people to be badged) want to be recognised, design around that, and iterate.

If you’re curious in how to go beyond the ‘microcredential’ approach to digital credentials, you might be interested in the free WAO email-based course Reframing Recognition. You’re also welcome to join us as part of the Open Recognition is for Everybody community.

Featured on the Digital2Learn podcast

Posted on by Doug Belshaw

Back in November last year, I was interviewed by the fine people people at the Digital2Learn podcast. We talked about a range of things, with the result actually coming out as two separate episodes this week.

Digital2Learn: Doug Belshaw / Digital Literacies, Latitudes, and Learning, Part 1 [PODCAST S1 E18]

Digital2Learn: Doug Belshaw / Digital Literacies, Latitudes, and Learning, Part 2 [PODCAST S1 E19]

The topics of conversation won’t be surprising to anyone who knows my work. We cover some fun stuff, and then dig into the following over the two episodes:

  • Digital Literacies
  • Open Educational Resources
  • Decentralisation
  • Digital credentials
  • MoodleNet

I’d like to thank Brad and Tiffany for interviewing me, and I look forward to any feedback that you have on the episodes, which I encourage you to leave over at Digital2Learn.

(I’ve closed comments here)

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