Open Badges Blog

An issuer organization decides to start a badge program, so its staff members design a badge system to go with the program’s content delivery and assessment practices. Then they run badge software to issue badges to recipients. 

There’s so much we want to say – we can’t put it all into an over-long announcement. Here is a growing list of some of the top questions:

What’s happening to the Badge Alliance?

The Badge Alliance is responding to the community’s evolving needs and adapting to focus more closely on the Open Badges Standard and organizing direct cooperation between Alliance members whose success the Standard depends on. Nate Otto is taking on the responsibility of leading the BA as it makes this transition. The BA aims to remain a strong informational resource and a place to organize collaboration and discussion between community members.

Will all of the 2014 working groups continue?

The BA is a the best place to connect to the conversations happening in the world of badges, but it should not be the only place where conversations happen. Most of the call series that started in BA working groups in 2014 will not be reestablished within the BA formally, but for any of these groups and topic area that wants to restart regular calls, we can develop a plan and the infrastructure to make it happen. For example, Dan Hickey, James Willis, and Carla Casilli are continuing the Open Badges in Higher Education working group, which kicked off its new call series July 7, with fortnightly calls already lined up for Tuesdays at Noon US Eastern. Other topic area interest groups have already started organizing, led by individuals and organizations dedicated to making badges work within their niches. A great example is the Open Badges for Teacher Professional Development consortium led by Ben Roome (BadgeList/Knowledgestreem) and Sarah Blattner (Tamritz). We recognize that many of these conversations are best distributed across the ecosystem, not centralized in one organization, and will support those interest groups with central coordination when needed.

Will the Community Calls continue?

Yes, same badge time, same badge channel. This call has been a great resource for the badges community over the years to stay checked in. Nate Otto will take over moderating the weekly community calls and welcomes feedback and suggestions about how to use this space to best serve the community.

What’s happening with the original Badge Alliance team?

It has always been the intention to make the Badge Alliance entity as streamlined and easily sustainable as possible, so that we can spend less time raising money to cover operations, and more to feedback into the ecosystem. Additionally, with a new scoped focus on the Open Badges Standard, we felt we needed more technical leadership. For those reasons, we’re transitioning the BA to a new, smaller core team led by Nate Otto. The original team will continue to contribute as community members, as well as through their own projects including Badge Labs and IMS Global.

When will I hear more?

Stay tuned to this, the Open Badges blog, BadgeAlliance.org, and the weekly community calls for more announcements and opportunities to ask questions or provide feedback.

What about the Cities of Learning?

The Cities of Learning program and its use case for Open Badges will continue to be improved and supported, including with the forthcoming release of a revamped badge-enabled platform that organizes learning. Look for more announcements about the Cities coming out over the summer and early fall as well as opportunities to sign your city up for summer 2017.

Nate is an employee of Concentric Sky. Won’t there be conflict of interest with Concentric Sky driving a neutral body like the BA since they have businesses interests around open badges and interest involved?

Much of the work of the next phase of building co-existing badge-enabled systems and services will be performed by member organizations of the BA, like Concentric Sky. Through the Standard Working Group charter and communication channels facilitated by the BA, all of these organizations will have a consensus-based process to guide the Open Badges specification and ecosystem forward in ways that seek to lift all boats as opposed to providing any commercial advantage to particular Alliance partners. Representatives from other commercial organizations working with Open Badges are likely to fill leadership roles and responsibilities in the future. As part of their responsibilities to the communities, representatives to the BA from these organizations will be asked to maintain a spirit of open cooperation, disclose their interests when relevant, and not take advantage of official roles within the BA to direct advantages to any particular organization. Questions, comments, and concerns are welcome in order to build the most effective and accessible BA possible.

Will the Badge Alliance be up to full speed right away?

No. Thanks for your patience as we work out the kinks, clean up loose ends, and get started on new initiatives. Our core regular programs, like the community call will have no interruption during the transition period, but it may take a little bit longer to get answers to questions and specific help as we finalize staffing for 2015-16.

2014 was a great building year for the badges ecosystem and the Badge Alliance (BA) network, and 2015 has been an exciting year so far. Rooms are overflowing for badging-related presentations at conferences around the world, more compelling use cases are popping up all the time, and the level of understanding and conversation about badges is far higher than two years ago. While the Badge Alliance has played a pivotal role in this progress, much of the work has come from the community itself.

The BA was created to grow the community and seat the ownership and accountability of the badging work in the ecosystem that was using badges. We’ve accomplished that - the BA has grown, with hundreds of organizations pledging to work together to issue and understand Open Badges. The first year of the BA’s investigation, community-building, and outreach provided us with a better understanding of the state of badges in the world, and connected a vibrant community around collaborating to use a shared technology. The momentum behind Open Badges has never been stronger.

Our initial efforts also revealed that there are still significant barriers to implementation and to achieving the community’s goals for Open Badges usability and impact. Over the last year, we discovered that the network is large and diverse, and that it is positioned to continue to diversify in multiple dimensions. It became clear that it is more important than ever for the BA to redouble its efforts on maintaining and improving badges technology and interoperability to make Open Badges the best way to recognize, capture, and communicate learning across all contexts.

With this analysis, we’ve decided to rescope the BA’s priorities and focus on the areas where the BA’s contribution to the community is most needed. Based on all of the foundational work that has been done to-date, it’s evident that zeroing in on the Open Badges Standard and the community around it is critical for accelerating adoption and realizing mainstream acceptance of open badges..

The BA is bringing on Nate Otto of Concentric Sky as its new Interim Director to help make this shift, drawing on his technical background and deep familiarity with the badges ecosystem to capitalize on the momentum that has built over the last 16 months. Nate will oversee the new BA focused on the Open Badges Standard, as well as other priorities as identified by the community. Nate is working with the founding Badge Alliance team to collect community feedback about priorities, and we welcome any additional thoughts community members have about this shift.

Erin Knight, Founding Executive Director, Badge Alliance
Nate Otto, Interim Director, Badge Alliance

Today is an exciting day for the open badges community! IMS Global, the leading education technology standards body, announced that they are kicking off a new IMS Digital Credentialing initiative.

In case you are unaware, IMS Global is a nonprofit membership organization that advances technology that can affordably scale and improve educational participation and attainment by collaborating on interoperability and adoption initiatives. Check out the IMS website for more information.

The new IMS Digital Credentialing initiative will be focused on furthering the adoption, integration and transferability of digital credentials, within institutions, schools, and corporations. The initial aim of IMS Digital Credentialing will be to further investigate and expand the reach, adoption and value of open badges in several potential ways, including: badge integration in the IMS eT work already underway, Open Badge Standard extension work, and exploration of new models of badge system design, storage, usage, or evaluation.

“This is exciting news for the open badging work, which was incubated initially at Mozilla Foundation and then expanded upon at the Badge Alliance,” according to Erin Knight, Executive Director of the Badge Alliance. “We’ve been working for years to get the kind of access and influence that IMS can bring to the table, and now we can focus on building the necessary extensions and/or new standards needed to make badges usable and valuable to institutions and employers across the world.”

Check out Erin’s blog post to learn more about the natural evolution of this exciting new initiative and what it means for the open badges community.

For more information on the new IMS Digital Credentialing initiative, check out the press release here.

Agenda: http://bit.ly/CC15_April8

Audio: http://bit.ly/CC15_April8audio

This week we dived into a discussion on soft skills and workforce development, led by those who kickstarted a conversation last week. We also heard from Alan Reid of Coastal Carolina University, where he developed an online program in which students earn performance-based digital badges in their first-year writing courses - http://ccc.coastal.edu/. They were able to successfully convince the college to recognize badges as a legitimate credit hour - that’s a pretty huge deal in the formal education space! 

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Agenda: http://bit.ly/CC15_March25

Audio: http://bit.ly/CC15_March25_audio

This week we heard from the folks at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, who invited BA Executive Director Erin Knight to an event back in January which explored innovations in workforce preparation with an emphasis on digital badging. It focused on new research linking specific work-ready (“soft”) skills to workforce outcomes and explore digital badging as a potential strategy for credentialing these skills. Various stakeholders contributed to the discussions, including young adults, workforce organizations, non-profits, and private industry representatives.

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