Currently maintained by 1EdTech (previously IMS Global), Open Badges are the world’s leading format for digital badges and are used to certify learning or the mastery of skills.
Digital credentials for the modern learner
Today, education goes way beyond classroom walls and traditional courses: learning takes place across educational, personal and professional spheres as technology enables us to acquire skills and knowledge anytime and anywhere. In this digital, rapidly changing environment, having a centralised online space to accreditate skills and knowledge is crucial for today’s learners. It’s also important for educational institutions, employers and organisations to quickly verify these credentials as legitimate.
Open Badges enable precisely this by allowing badge receivers to host their badges in one single location and organizations to easily check that the earner’s skills and competences are trustworthy.
An open badge issued with Moodle
A closer look at Open Badges
Open Badges are a type of digital badges, that is, a visual representation of accomplishments or skills, that you can display online. Besides being a visual symbol, they contain a series of information about the credentials it certifies. When an institution issues a digital badge following the Open Badges standard, this information is embedded into the badge file as standardised metadata that other platforms can access and easily track back to the issuer institution for verification.
Some of the information that lies beneath an Open Badge includes the badge name, the criteria to obtain it, the issue date and an expiry date for recurring certifications. All of this can be traced back to the issuer organisation to verify that the badge is genuine and up to date.
Because the information is embedded within the badge, anyone has the freedom to store their badges together in a centralised location or digital backpack, like badgr.
Moodle and Open Badges
Since Moodle 3.8, our LMS is certified as an Open Badges v2.0 issuer. For our upcoming release Moodle 3.11 (May 2020), we are working with 1EdTech to be one of the first platforms to implement Open Badges v2.1 – the upcoming version of IMS’ standard.
As part of the open education movement, at Moodle we’re committed to using open source and open standards so that anyone can build an open, integrated digital learning ecosystem. Learn more about creating and issuing Badges with Moodle in our Badges documentation.
