Badges

	Mozilla Open Badges
	Owner: Erin Knight, Carla Casilli, Sunny Lee, Emily Goligoski, Chris McAvoy, Brian Brennan, Mike Larsson, Jess Klein, Chloe Varelidi, Atul Varma, Meg Cole, Jade Forester	Updated: 2024-12-3
	Mozilla's Open Badges make it easy for anyone to issue, earn and display badges across the web through a shared infrastructure that's free and open to all.

What is a Badge?

badge [baj]: a special or distinctive mark, token, or device worn as a sign of allegiance, membership, authority, achievement, etc. (Source: Dictionary.com)

A badge is a symbol or indicator of an accomplishment, skill, quality or interest. From the Boy and Girl Scouts, to PADI diving instruction, to the more recently popular geo-location game, Foursquare, badges have been successfully used to set goals, motivate behaviors, represent achievements and communicate success in many contexts. A “digital badge” is an online record of achievements, tracking the recipient’s communities of interaction that issued the badge and the work completed to get it. Digital badges can support connected learning environments by motivating learning and signaling achievement both within particular communities as well as across communities and institutions. (Source: Erin Knight White Paper)

Digital Badges vs Open Badges

A digital badge is an online representation of a skill you’ve earned. Open Badges take that concept 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.

Open Badges are:

• Free and open: Mozilla Open Badges is not proprietary. It’s free software and an open technical standard any organization can use to create, issue and verify digital badges.
• Transferable: Collect badges from multiple sources, online and off, into a single backpack. Then display your skills and achievements on social networking profiles, job sites, websites and more.
• Stackable: Whether they’re issued by one organization or many, badges can build upon each other and be stacked to tell the full story of your skills and achievements.
• Evidence-based: Open Badges are information-rich. Each badge has important metadata which is hard-coded into the badge image file itself that links back to the issuer, criteria and verifying evidence.

Open Badges make it easy to:

• Get recognition for the things you learn;
• Give recognition for the things you teach;
• Verify skills; and
• Display your verified badges across the web.

What is Mozilla's Open Badges project?

Learning today happens everywhere, not just in the classroom. But it's often difficult to get recognition for skills and achievements that happen outside of school. Mozilla's Open Badges project is working to solve that problem, making it easy for anyone to issue, earn and display badges across the web through a shared technical infrastructure. The result: helping people of all ages gain and display 21st century skills and unlock new career and educational opportunities.

Want to know more about Open Badges? Read about what badges are and how they work and check out our Frequently Asked Questions page to find some answers, or shoot us an email at badges@badgealliance.org

Mozilla BadgeKit

Mozilla BadgeKit is a set of foundational tools to make the badging process easy.

BadgeKit:

• Supports key stages in the badging experience including creating, designing, assessing and issuing.
• Includes remixable templates and milestone badges allowing for easy customization.
• Provides modular and open options (standards) for the community of badge makers to use and build upon within their existing sites or systems.

The hosted version of BadgeKit is currently only available for select organizations as part of the Cities of Learning initiative - sign-up for private beta has now ended. Alternatively, anyone can download the code from GitHub and implement it on their own servers. A tutorial for this process is available here.

Read more about BadgeKit

Get started with Open Badges

Ready? Check out our site and Community page

• http://openbadges.org
• http://community.openbadges.org/

Set? Create your Backpack

• https://backpack.openbadges.org

Go! Get some Badges!

• Check out the Boys and Girls Clubs of Canada Badge Centre and earn your first badges!

Read more about the Technology behind Open Badges.
Find the Onboarding information for Issuers, Displayers and Earners and get started!

Become part of the Community

• Open Badges learning group and development group -- Subscribe to these groups to take part in ongoing conversations about badges in the wild.
• Open Badges Community Calls -- Join our weekly global call every Wednesday at 9am PT / 12pm ET / 5pm GMT. During these hour-long calls we share our progress and encourage you to share your Open Badges work, questions, and comments. They're fun and we encourage you to come along!
• Open Badges Research & Design Calls -- If you are interested in Open Badges Research and Badge System Design, join this call, held on Wednesdays in the hour before the Community Calls, at 8am PT / 11am ET / 4pm GMT.
• Open Badges Blog -- Follow our blog for Open Badges news and updates.
• Twitter -- Follow @OpenBadges and use the #OpenBadges hashtag to join the conversation on Twitter.
• Facebook -- Like us on Facebook for news and updates you can share with your networks.
• IRC -- Reach us on IRC at irc.mozilla.org, #badges
• Open Badges presentation materials -- Want to give an Open Badges presentation? To get you started, here's a PDF. Please note that all of these documents are CC by SA.
• Common badges terms and vocabulary -- Help us to build a common lexicon of digital badge terms.

Who is using Open Badges?

• User stories -- Hypothetical examples of how badges can help solve problems in everyday scenarios.
  
• 2 Million Better Futures -- This project from CGI America aims to help 1 million workers and 1 million students succeed using Open Badges by 2016.
• Chicago Summer of Learning -- The first citywide badging initiative, which was so successful that Mayor Emmanuel committed to continuing the program next year.
• Participating Issuers -- An updated list of badge issuers and designers.
• General Badge Issuing Platform Chart -- A list of platforms for issuing open badges generated and continuously updated by the community.
• Add your organization! -- If you're issuing, designing or exploring open badges with your communities, add your organization to our list of issuers.

Further Reading

• Case Studies -- A set of case studies looking at how badges are being used to capture learning and achievements in higher education, professional training, and after school programs.
• White Paper -- An in-depth look at how badges can reinvent 21st century learning
  
• Open Badges Validation Paper -- An exploration of how to build an open and distributed accreditation system for badges and the organizations that issue them
  
• Press coverage -- A collection of articles and related items from community member Sheryl Grant (new Press Coverage page coming soon!)
• Open Badges roadmap -- We're continually updating the roadmap with new features.
• Digital Media and Learning Competition: Badges for LifeLong Learning (administered by HASTAC and funded by MacArthur) -- click to learn more.

Press Inquiries

Please contact press@mozilla.com.

Get involved with Mozilla

• Join Mozilla -- you could get a snazzy t-shirt for joining!
• Mozilla's mission -- Read more about our mission to promote openness, innovation & opportunity on the Web.
• Like Mozilla on Facebook and Follow Mozilla on Twitter
• Get updates from Mozilla -- Be the first to know what we're doing and how you can get involved.