Are Digital Badges the future of accreditation, credentialing and recognition?

Can Digital Badges be the future of accreditation, credentialing and recognition, and, in short, can be the future of academic and professional curriculum? In this way, can badges transform the way we develop our professional careers?

Maybe... can badges be a disruptive trend? Well, a lot of questions, so, first of all... what is a Digital Badge?

According to EDUCAUSE, Digital badges—awarded by institutions, organizations, groups, or individuals—recognize a particular experience or signify accomplishments, such as completion of a project or mastery of a skill. Today’s economy necessitates a workforce that educates itself beyond formal degrees. Badging documents skills gained through various learning and engagement opportunities via professional organizations and communities in a way that was not possible before. These digital credentials recognize a model of ongoing learning that can include service, leadership, and subject matter expertise.

Typically, in this systems there a three actors:

-         Issuers – they create badges, make them available to earners and award them.

-         Earners – they apply for badges and decide where to display them.

-         Displayers – they display badges earned by particular earners.

In this way, an institution can create they own badges to award their students or earners. Students or earners can collect badges, not only during their school life, but also later in their professional career, so they can build-up their detailed 21^st century curriculum.

Badges evolve rapidly and there are many places or institutions that use this kind of microcredential system. In this way, we can see the Open Badges Mozillaproject. Open Badges take the concept of digital badges and take one step further, and allows you to verify your skills, interests and achievements through credible organizations and attaches that information to the badge image file, hard-coding the metadata for future access and review. Because the system is based on an open standard, earners can combine multiple badges from different issuers to tell the complete story of their achievements — both online and off. Badges can be displayed wherever earners want them on the web, and share them for employment, education or lifelong learning. It’s a free software and an open technical standard any organization can use to create, issue and verify digital badges.

I think this is a clear trend in education for 2015. And especially relevant for the lifelong learning and the rest of competences and skills that we develop thru our professional careers.

Are you agree with this statements? Are you working with badges? I would be delight to hear about your experiences!!

Learn more about badges: https://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/EST1402.pdf