Technical FAQ
What is this?
This is a list of frequently asked questions about the technical requirements for the Chicago Summer of Learning badging program.
Who is this for?
This is for organizations that are planning on issuing badges along with their program this summer. It is written with a non-technical user in mind, but can act as a solid jumping off point for a more technical user. Additional deeper technical documents are referenced in the “where do I go from here?” question.
Who is Mozilla?
Mozilla is a non-profit company that cares about protecting the open Web and helping people benefit from it. You might know us from our open source browser, Firefox. Mozilla is leading the Open Badges project, which is exploring an alternative credentialing system through digital badges. We’ve built the standard and technical plumbing to allow badges to work together for the learner. For the Chicago Summer of Learning, Mozilla is playing the following roles:
- Advising on overall campaign design.
- Supporting the organizations on badge design and implementation.
- Building and hosting the badge-issuing platform.
- Celebrating with the rest of Chicago this summer!
Help me with definitions...
There’s a handful of words that will come up often in the technical implementation of an open badge system,
- Issuer - the issuer is the organization that awards a badge. Each participating organization in the summer of learning will be considered an open badge issuer.
- Learner - the person that earns the open badge.
- Open Badge - a 90x90 PNG graphic, and set of metadata that aligns with the Open Badge specification. The technical requirements of the badge will be taken care of by Mozilla, unless an open badge issuer wants to build their own issuing platform.
- Open Badge Issuing Platform - software that allows an issuer to issue an open badge to a learner. Mozilla’s open badge issuing platform is called OpenBadger. All participating organizations in the Summer of Learning will have access to OpenBadger.
- Open Badges Infrastructure (OBI) - The OBI is the ‘plumbing’ that allows badges to be interoperable, and us to build an alternative credentialing system at an ecosystem level. It includes the badge metadata specification, APIs for pushing badges in and pulling badges out and a set of badge repositories called the Badge Backpacks. It is an open source project, hosted at http://github.com/mozilla/openbadges
- Badge Backpack - A repository and management interface for each learner to use to collect open badges from multiple issuers, create and publish groups of badges, and share badges. The Mozilla hosted Badge Backpacks are at http://beta.openbadges.org
- Displayer - A website that allows their users to display badges they’ve earned and collected in their backpack.
- Criteria Page - A web page that describes what a learner needs to do to earn a particular badge. For more information, see the question below, “How do I create a Criteria Page?”