What is Open Badges?
Traditionally, participation in training courses, taking exams or generally having certain skills or knowledge are documented with certificates or confirmations of participation. With Digital Badges, such confirmations and proofs take on a digital character.
Digital badges have been around as long as the internet, but the Open Badges standard is relatively new (founded in 2012 by the Mozilla Foundation) and has many advantages over the classic digital badges.
Why Open Badges?
Each open badge is associated with a picture and information about the badge, the recipient, the issuer and evidence. Some advantages of Open Badges over the classical digital badges:
- Not controlled by any one organization (OBI1 is free, open source and run for the world wide community)
- Evidence based (all infos hard coded as meta data)
- Stackable
- Transferable
- User is in control
How does it work?
The following graphic illustrates how badges can be issued, awarded, displayed and verified.
1 OBI = Open Badges Infrastructure
How does Swiss Connect Academy use OpenBadges?
Swiss Connect Academy has recognized the advantages of Open Badges and has been testing the possible areas of application since 2022. Anyone who completes a leadership or management module at SCA in the future will be awarded an Open Badge. Another special badge will be awarded upon completion of the entire course. These badges can be collected by the recipients in their backpack and shared as desired via social media.
Sources:
https://badge.wiki/wiki/What_Are_Open_Badges%3F https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Badges https://openbadges.org/
