The Open Badges team has been hard at work to release version 1.0 of our open source software. Changes you’ll see (drumroll please) starting this week include:
- A new Backpack user experience. Badge earners who send their badges to their Backpacks are being greeted by a fresh interface and an enhanced user experience. We’ve made creating personally meaningful collections more intuitive and badges more descriptively displayed. This allows earners to easily see key pieces of badge information at a glance.
- A new logo and visual brand for Open Badges. We’ve undertaken a brand review and are excited to share a dynamic new look for openbadges.org and other touchpoints. The cubes were created to connote openness and a solid standard, and you can see them extend across visual materials for earners, issuers, and displayers:
- Issuer insignias now available. You’ve asked and we’ve answered! Insignias are now up for the taking for issuers’ websites. They’ll soon be embeddable, and in the meantime you can feature one of these images:
- Extending the metadata specification. Metadata is what differentiates Open Badges from digital badges: it makes badges information-rich and evidence-based in ways that self-reported items on resumes don’t. We’ve added the following new optional fields to our metadata specification:
- Standards alignment: Enabling issuers to indicate how their badges align with educational and industry standards, governing bodies, and more.
- Tags: In the interest of creating a folksonomy of badges, issuers can now include tags.
- Signed badges: We will enable organizations to issue badges with signed assertions in addition to hosted assertions.
- Backpack Connect: Autopush: With Backpack Connect, earner-approved issuers will be able to automatically push earned badges into the earner’s Backpack.
- Badge expiration: We have built out a new experience around badge expiration, notifying badge earners when their badges are expiring.
We’re far from finished. Stay tuned for additional Backpack updates, COPPA implementaiton plans, and Facebook display integration, all of which are coming your way soon.
Community members’ efforts to test, address issues, and talk about this undertaking have been immensely helpful as we create an international standard to make badges shareable and interoperable. You’re helping to build an ecosystem that makes learners’ skills and interests more recognizable. We couldn’t be more excited about this major milestone and your participation in it!
