Open badges for recognising and validating achievements

Digital Badges are virtual evidence of a person’s professional qualifications, skill, interest, or achievement, as well as tools for verifying and displaying the same. These badges, which are still in the early stages of development, are frequently used for low-stakes credentials. Digital Badges are designed to reflect the associated certificate and have a clean, professional appearance. Open Badges, a technical standard for issuing and displaying digital badges across online websites and non-profit organisations, was created by the Mozilla Foundation in 2011.

What are Open Badges?

The most widely used Digital Badge in the world is Open Badges, a type of portable, shareable, and verifiable digital badge. Open Badges include verifiable meta-data that tracks and verifies the contents of the digital badge.

As we all know, digital badges are a digital representation of competencies and professional achievements; however, open badges are a type of digital badge that is issued by credible institutions and stores the records in databases, making the digital badge easy to verify, track, and trace it back to its source.

The Mozilla Foundation founded and launched open badges in 2011, and their popularity has grown steadily since then.

How do Open badges help?

By presenting your Digital Badge as an earner, you may demonstrate your competency in the abilities you’ve earned. Individuals can use their respective credential platforms to claim and receive digital badges. They can store and manage digital badges in their open badges digital backpack and use them across all digital platforms.

One may make learning more engaging as an issuer by breaking down courses into modules and awarding each one with a gamified digital badge. Recognize candidates’ success by awarding learners shareable digital badges, micro-credentials, or stacked credentials based on their achievements.

Developers can create and personalise digital badges based on the role or criterion of the activity, as well as enable tracking and analytic tools to learn more about applicants’ engagement, performance, participation, and progress. The developer can enable features such as displaying, sharing, and hosting Digital badges.

Why should you use Open badges for validating and recognising achievements:

Learners enjoy being recognised for their participation, progress, and accomplishments. The introduction of open badges, which recognise and reward users’ skills and abilities, encourages engagement because the digital badge validates their participation and progress, thereby increasing productivity. Open badges are a wonderful approach to get students involved in competency-based education, which focuses on skills rather than finishing a course promptly.

Open badges can be obtained from a variety of online and offline sources and stored in a single storage system known as a digital wallet, allowing users to display both hard and soft skills and achievements on social media and professional networking platforms. Digital badges, URLs, or links can be embedded in portfolios, résumés, and personal blogs.

In Summary:

Open badges are issued by authorised credential programmes that use blockchain technology and are supported by meta-data, making them easy to verify and safeguard with bank-level security. Open badges are the most effective way to recognise the achievements, skills, and progress of learners or individuals.