In 2015 we began to certify the competencies of our undergraduate students. In an earlier post, I explained how we created a competency model to enhance the employability of our undergraduates. We set up a database to record the competencies our students acquired at the University and we then issued a certificate to them on graduation, providing them with a personalized record of their competencies. We were proud of this because it seemed to be something that no-one else was doing, making our students stand out. There was a significant organizational burden involved, but it was worth it.
We couldn’t have imagined that barely two years after beginning this adventure, we would discover technology which would enable us to take an unprecedented leap into the future. This would be the second major milestone of our journey.
In 2017, a colleague from the IT department came to see me and asked, “Have you heard of Open Badges?”. “Open what?” was my answer. No, I hadn’t heard of them. He began to talk about images with associated metadata, an open standard, Mozilla… The IT team led by Jose Luis Roig had just discovered badging and they suggested we explore the possibilities it might offer for our Certificate of Competencies project.
We soon saw that this new technology was the perfect fit for the work we had already done. Our data-fields were almost exactly the same as those for the badge metadata. But now the task was to understand what we now had to do and how we could combine badging with what we were already doing.
But the more we looked into it, the more enthusiastic we became. We became familiar with many new terms, which I, at least, hadn’t been aware of: assertion, badgeclass, recipient, issuer, json, collection, backpack, etc. Sometimes we got confused, sometimes we didn’t understand anything and sometimes we got stuck. But we kept going.
Finally – I don’t quite remember when exactly – we decided to take the plunge, leave the PDF behind and use badges to certify the skills students acquired during their time with us. Because we knew we had the right framework: we had our model, we had defined our competencies, we had a database with fields that could be transformed into badge metadata, and we had thousands of records of student achievement.
For the development of our first set of badges, we decided not to set out alone but to seek a companion for the road. Our IT department turned to our old friends at ENCAMINA. The team led by Hugo de Juan worked hard to understand what we were doing with the Certificate of Competencies and how we could harness the possibilities that the Open Badges standard offered.
The result was our first manual on badge digitalization in 2019. After discovering Open Badges, it took us two years to put together an implementation proposal – a plan for how we could actually use this technology. This is what happens when there’s no easy path already laid out to follow.
The first diagram summarising the creation of CEU badges was this:
The diagram above shows the basic architecture for the issue of badges, which we still use today. The only real difference today is that we no longer use an ad-hoc database to record student competencies: we now do this directly in the Dynamics 365 CRM. We still use, develop and seek to improve the APIs that mesh with the badging platform. Initially, the platform was Badgr, which has now become Canvas Credentials.
Here is a representation of the API for the combination of the Dynamics 365 CRM with the badging platform Badgr.
This was the moment at which badging was adopted as a method for certifying competencies – and it was here to stay.
We issued our first badges in 2019. We were tentative at first, only certifying the soft skills of the students who graduated that year. This was a trial run to see how it might work for the whole project. And it was a great success. So much so, that we decided to stop issuing the pdf containing the Certificate of Competencies. Over the following months, we were able to upload the complete Certificate of Competencies database into the CRM and Badgr.
We started off by using version 2.0 of Badgr. Just a year and half later, we moved to version 3.0, which was also a significant milestone in the development of this technology. But that’s a whole other story which deserves a post of its own.
The number of badges issued, the number of students receiving badges, and the number of competencies we certify have all continued to increase since then.
And yet we haven’t needed to change our model, which has remained robust and intact in its essentials and structure. But new and more powerful concepts have been added to the mix, such as that of the microcredential, but that’s another story too.
Where did we gain our inspiration from?
For a project like this, the participants must show curiosity, in order to constantly explore the possibilities and discover what work is being done in this area and who is leading the way We have to constantly search for role-models, so that we can compare our work with what they are doing and to be sure that we are heading in the right direction.
Our research in this respect has gathered a huge amount of information over the years. We have gigabytes of all kinds of information: some academic, some technical, and some aimed at educating the general public. We continue to add to this as we move forward with our project.
Let’s pick out just a few examples. These are the things which have had the greatest impact on us and inspired us to create our own system – we owe the people behind them our thanks.
Where it all started was with the Mozilla Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation, the true creators of Open Badges:
- What is Mozilla’s Open Badges project? | Intro to Open Badges with a more up-to-date page here: Home | IMS Open Badges
- What is a Badge? – MacArthur Foundation (macfound.org)
We were also regular visitors to badgealliance.org, which no longer exists, but it was an excellent source of information about a range of technical issues and uses for badges. The organization which is currently responsible for the standard is 1EDTECH: Open Badges | IMS Global Learning Consortium
One of our first sources of inspiration was the University of Notre Dame and their ePortfolio. We perceived numerous similarities between our Certificate of Competencies and what Notre Dame had done with their Badges.
We also liked what the University of Utah had done, particularly their way of communicating their project.
Of course, our greatest role model was SUNY. They had a vision that we identified with, as it was not just about technology but also about major organizational change.
Some developments caught us by surprise: we never imagined that NATO would issue badges to certify their training.
Of all the articles which we’ve read, we’d like to highlight two by one of our greatest inspirations, Sheryl Grant, who gave us such great support when we organized the 1st Microcredentials International Week in 2022:
- Grant, S.L. (2016) Promising Practices of Open Credentials: Five Years of Progress. December 2016. Mozilla Foundation.
- Grant, S.L., (2016). History and context of open digital badges. In L.Y.Muilenburg and Z. L. Berge (Eds.), Digital Badges in Education: Trends, Issues and Cases. Routledge: New York, NY.
And to finish here are two videos, now dated in different ways, but which helped us to explain the project to different stakeholders:
- One of them is from the MacArthur Foundation: a real classic! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgLLq7ybDtc&t=1s
- And this video explains badging from the point of view of the now defunct Badgr: What are Open Badges? – YouTube
