Open Badge: what is it and what does it do

What is an Open Badge?

An Open Badge is an image which tells something about you: something you know how to do, something you have taken part in, a  community you are involved with.

An Open Badge is a digital photo of your skills. Like a photo which not only has a picture, but also provides information on the place and time it was shot, the Badge too contains extra information – metadata – which can be read by all the applications which can read Open Badges.Metadata allow one to make sure that the Badge was really assigned to you and to access all the descriptive contents of the Badge, hosted on the platform which issued it.

Metadata are written in the Open Badge using an open source format: so a great many platforms assign Open Badges and allow one to collect and show them. Bestr is one of these.

On Bestr, there is a page describing the contents for each Badge (see the page dedicated to Badge Bestr Friend), and anyone who obtains a  Badge has a dedicated page, with his name, the date on which he obtained the Badge and a description of the  Badge.

When you want to show the competencies represented by your Open Badge you can send the image which you download from the page dedicated to your Badge, or the link to the page itself.

Why have I received an Open Badge?

Any company, association, organisation can issue a Badge  (even an individual can). Assigning a Badge is an act of trust, by which one declares that a learner has been through an experience, developed a competency, shown an interest.

Organisations assign Badges (instead of attendance certificates or degrees) to highlight individual qualities or experiences, which the person can then group together, building his own personal narrative of his professional profile.