Open Badges

Open Badges - Logo

This learning resource introduces the concept of Open Badges for different usergroups. This learning resource is following the Open Community Approach and informs

* Learners about workflow for earning badges
* Teacher to assign Open Badges to courses and assessments,
* Administrator of Educational Institutions to learn about integration into the IT infrastructure of the institution,
* Technicians for the Open Badge IT infrastructure to setup the IT infrastructure to issue Open Badges,
* Job Application Management to learn about matching support for vacant positions with Open Badges.

## Learning Tasks

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* (Sustainable Development Goals) Identify 17 learning modules for each goals and create Open Badges for each goal, by using icon for the badge, which is similar to icon for the sustainable development goal. After getting a badge for a single SDG the learner should be able to explain how sustainability is addressed in the goal and used indicators for a given example, i.e. how to measure the impact of a transformation towards more sustainability. Does it make sense to gain badges for all 17 goals or could it be sufficient gain an Open SDG badge just for a single SDG (e.g. SDG 3 Good health and well-being).
* (Universities) Universities follow a standard process for getting a degree. Some of the workload of students may no fit into a defined curriculum and might be suitable only for a few students. Nevertheless the effort of student learning additional skills or gaining expertise in other non standard areas of the curriculum can be rewarded by University with Badges (e.g. for a course about Machine Learning that is not part of the curriculum of environmental sciences).

## Key Questions of Learning Resources

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The key questions for the learners are:

* (Basic Workflow) What is the basic workflow of earning, issuing and displaying Open Badges?
* (Coexistence of Certificates) Do the Open Badges replace classic badges and/or certificates for courses (e.g. accredited by a Higher Learning Commission) or do these certificated co-exist?
* (Institutional Workflow) How can I apply Open Badges in my everyday jobs without getting in conflict with standard certification workflow at my educational institution?
* (Institutional Implementation) How can we introduce the Open Badge Framework at our institution? E.g. shall we use an available Online Service for the Open Badge Infrastructure like BadgeR or shall we setup our own Open Source Framework for issuing Open Badges at my institution?
* (Wikiversity and Open Badges) Wikiversity provide course content for learning (e.g. a Project Management or Learning content about Information Systems). Educational Institutions provide certificates of officially accredited. Institutions and educational units have heterogeneous requirements and constraints even if the work with the same topic (like project management). There is an overlap of two courses about project management (intersection) and differences between those course. How can we cover those needs with the structure of the Wikiversity content and an appropriate design of Open Badges, so that underlying content of course is visible in Wikiversity and certified with Open Badges?

## Open Badges Framework

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Learn about the specification of the Open Badges Framework[1][2].

## Badge Alliance

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Educational Institutions can work together in an international framework. Students can assign a certificate from international institutions to free workload. In Wikiversity the course content is visible for everyone as open repository of learning material. A version control is applied to the learning resource and a Open Badge issued at a certain time contains meta data about the course content and could refer to a specific state of the learning resources a time index t. The trust in the educational institution (e.g. University) that issues a certificate is related of trust in the issued Open Badge and primarily depended on technological framework. The technological Open Badge framework should assure that the collected Open Badges were really issued from the University X,Y,Z. This is also important for University allow free workload in a specific course curriculum.

If a student gets Open Badge for course content at University X and adds this free workload to a course the student works in at his/her own University Y. The student gets a classical certificate from University Y and the Badge Alliance support a network of Open Badge issuing institutions (e.g. Universities) and is can be used for accepting remotely acquired credit points of free workload.

## Subtopics

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* Digital Badges as Generalization of Open Badges: Explore other forms of digital badges.
* P2Pu School of Badges
* Certifications in an Open Community Approach
* Open Educational Resources and Open Badges

## Links

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* Badge Alliance[3]
* BadgR[4] \- a free and open source achievement recognition and tracking system used to issue, organize, and share Open Badges.
* Backpack Mozilla Open Badge \- a digital server to store and share Open Badges

## References

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1. ↑ Gibson, D., Ostashewski, N., Flintoff, K., Grant, S., & Knight, E. (2015). Digital badges in education. Education and Information Technologies, 20(2), 403-410.
2. ↑ Randall, D. L., Harrison, J. B., & West, R. E. (2013). Giving credit where credit is due: Designing open badges for a technology integration course. TechTrends, 57(6), 88-95.
3. ↑ Badge Alliance - Website - (accessed 2017/09/17) - http://www.badgealliance.org/
4. ↑ BadgR - website of a free and open source achievement recognition and tracking system used to issue, organize, and share Open Badges - OpenSource Software and Webservice - (accessed 2017/09/14) - https://info.badgr.io/