Mozilla Open Badges Blog

We’re thrilled to have The New York Times spread the word about badges developments, particularly 2 Million Better Futures, coming out of Chicago this week:

Working with Mozilla, the MacArthur Foundation and a consortium interested in virtual learning, former President Bill Clinton announced a project on Thursday to expand the use of Open Badges — online credentials that employers or universities can use in hiring, admissions, promotions or awarding credit. The badges serve as credentials that can help self-taught computer programmers, veterans returning to civilian life and others show skills they learned outside a classroom. At the Clinton Global Initiative America meeting in Chicago Thursday, DePaul University and the Information Technology Industry Council pledged to incorporate badges into their hiring, admissions or credentialing.

See Former President Bill Clinton announce 2 Million Better Futures at this week’s Clinton Global Initiative America:

Today is a monumental day for Open Badges. At the annual CGI America conference in Chicago, former President Bill Clinton just announced a groundbreaking new initiative - 2 Million Better Futures - dedicated to helping 1 million students and 1 million U.S. workers access opportunities through Open Badges. Let’s just repeat that one more time….a commitment to helping 2 million lives through Open Badges! The best part is that we (Mozilla) have teamed up with John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and HASTAC to take the reins and fully commit to making this happen.

Through the initiative, the Open Badges partners (including us!) will be scaling up the use of badges nationwide over the next three years so that 1 million K-12 and college students and 1 million workers will be able to use badges to advance their academic progress or further their career goals.

So why badges and why now? According to Erin Knight, Mozilla’s Senior Director of Learning and Badges, “The learning and employment landscape is changing drastically in today’s digital world and it’s widely apparent that we need credentials that can support the current demands. Badges are credentials for the 21st Century digital age, which can be used to represent a more complete and verified picture of what people know and can do, and can connect them to better jobs and advancement. Employers and institutions will be able to go beyond abstract credentials or self-reported resumes, to more credible information on candidates and find better matches, unlocking better professional futures for all involved.”

To no surprise, the commitment is already in motion. Nichole Pinkard, Digital Youth Network Founder and Visiting Associate Professor in the College of Computing and Digital Media at DePaul University, announced today that DePaul University will be one of the first institutions to join the Open Badges commitment by starting to accept badges for college credit. You too can commit to the 2 Million Better Futures initiative here http://www.2mbetterfutures.org/ !

And as always, we at Mozilla, along with the other partners, will provide outreach and technical assistance to help employers and universities across the country incorporate Open Badges in hiring, promotions, admissions and credit over the next three years.

As the team spearheading the Open Badges movement, today is one of those days in which we truly feel like we are changing the world, one badge at a time. Today we raise our glasses and virtually toast to you, the Open Badges community of earners, issuers, displayers and employers, as together we can and will better the futures for 2 million lives (and more!).

For more information check out Clinton Global Initiative and join the commitment here. Make sure to follow us on Twitter for minute-by-minute updates over the week.

Cheers to you helping shape the future of Open Badges with us!

Rebecca Itow and Daniel Hickey are currently publishing a four-part series dedicated to introducing the Design Principles and Documentation Project, which highlights the emerging design principles around recognizing, assessing, motivating and evaluating learning. The first post introduces the project and focuses on recognizing the emerging principles, while the second dives into the principles of assessing:

At their core, digital badges recognize some kind of learning. But if one is going to recognize learning, there is usually some kind of assessment of that learning so that claims about learning can be substantiated by evidence. Over the course of the last year, we have tracked the way that assessment practices have unfolded across the 30 DML Badges for Lifelong Learning competition winners. We have categorized these practices into ten more general principles for assessing learning with digital badges. Read more…

Thomas Friedman published a story on applicant and employer matching this week that we wanted to share with labor market-interested individuals:

Underneath the huge drop in demand that drove unemployment up to 9 percent during the recession, there’s been an important shift in the education-to-work model in America. Anyone who’s been looking for a job knows what I mean. It is best summed up by the mantra from the Harvard education expert Tony Wagner that the world doesn’t care anymore what you know; all it cares “is what you can do with what you know.” And since jobs are evolving so quickly, with so many new tools, a bachelor’s degree is no longer considered an adequate proxy by employers for your ability to do a particular job — and, therefore, be hired. So, more employers are designing their own tests to measure applicants’ skills. And they increasingly don’t care how those skills were acquired: home schooling, an online university, a massive open online course, or Yale. They just want to know one thing: Can you add value?

Mark Surman, Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation, wrote a post recently about the future of badges:

The thing is: there has been way more excitement and pick up of badges than we expected. Even though Open Badges only launched officially in March, there are already over 800 unique providers who have issued almost 100,000 badges. We are also starting to see the development of city-wide systems where learners can pick up hundreds of different badges from across dozens of learning orgs and combine them all into a single profile. Chicago is the first city to do this (June 1), but Philadelphia and San Francisco are not far behind. And, this is just the tip of the iceberg: orgs like the Clinton Global Initiative and the National Science Foundation are focusing on badges in a way that is likely to drive even more educators to pick up the Open Badges standard, making their badges interoperable with others.

Read the post in full here.

Last month Doug Belshaw, Badges & Skills Lead for the Mozilla Foundation, gave a keynote at the PELeCON conference. In a presentation comprised almost entirely of animated GIFs, Doug talks about the past, present and future of Open Badges.

You can find the slidedeck for this presenstation here.

DigitalMe is a non-profit based in Leeds, England that helps young people gain skills and confidence through new technology. They were the only UK winners of the Digital Media & Learning Competition and have proved to be   fantastic allies for Open Badges advocacy in Europe (and beyond!)

They’ve use their experience with Open Badges to create a new Badge Design Canvas that helps those designing badges think through various issues.

It’s a free download, available under a Creative Commons license!

TechPro has just featured Open Badges in its list of open source projects worth contributions:

There’s no way to communicate exactly how important Mozilla is to the world wide web. Mozilla brought us an open source, forward-thinking browser when we needed one, threw us a mail client miles better than Outlook in Thunderbird, and now brings us an open source, HTML5-based mobile operating system in Firefox OS. In short: Mozilla’s commitment to excellence in open source has drive the web to where it is today…

A central, open repository for badges is ideal, and look forward to seeing Open Badges used on many Mozilla websites. You can check out this page to see how you can issue badges and this page to view how you can display user badges. Again, another trusted central site for managing user information, all thanks to Mozilla. OpenBadges is an up and coming project and could use all of the community support it can get.