Learning today happens everywhere. But it's often difficult to get recognition for skills and achievements that happen online or out of school. Mozilla Open Badges helps solve that problem, making it easy for any organization to issue, manage and display digital badges across the web.
Many organizations are issuing badges as a part of their curriculum, but most do so in a siloed environment. The Open Badges specification allows badge systems to push their badges to a unified backpack, giving the badge earner control of their data.
Mozilla's Webmaker badges give a good overview of a typical issuing program.
More information about the project, its goals, and an explanation of how the technology works can be found on our website, http://www.openbadges.org.
This is a short list of possible projects in the Open Badges project.
- Learning path recommendations - Suggesting to students a next step based on the badges they’ve already earned.
- Badge ecosystem data - Study data the backpack is producing to find trends that lead to learner success.
- Backpack Federation - Build a system that allows badge backpacks to communicate, allowing cross system aggregate queries.
- Build a Badge Issuer - Starting from scratch, or using an existing badge issuing framework, design a badge system that works for the class.
- Build a Badge accreditation system - Allow badge issuers to endorse one another’s badges, and use those endorsements to determine the overall ‘weight’ of a badge.
- Extend ClopenBadger to include analytics around badge acceptance. Give issuers data around the average time it takes a user to earn a badge, how many users give up on the path to badge earning, etc.
The project has a roadmap that culminates in the DML conference. The ideas above are meant as idea-starters, not a definitive list. We're open to any innovative use of Open Badges. Maybe scraping existing silo'd badge services and converting the earned badges to open badges spec, or figuring out the best way to issue badges on a mobile device for a in-person conference. We're open to innovation, the real goal is to make it easy for self directed learners to show what they've done, and help them figure out what else they could do.
- Chris McAvoy (cmcavoy) - chris@mozillafoundation.org, engineering manager, Open Badges. Principal contact for the project.
- Brian Brennan (brianloveswords) - brian@mozillafoundation.org, tech lead, Open Badges.
- Sunny Lee (threeqube) - sunny@mozillafoundation.org, product lead, Open Badges
The best way to contact us is via IRC at irc.mozilla.org, in the #badges room.