Open Badges, current state of development

I’ve mentioned Open Badges earlier this year. It’s an open standard proposal by the Mozilla Foundation that attempts to create a web-based way for anyone (or any institution) to give accreditation to anyone on any topic. Things have progressed nicely in these few months. Here’s what you can already do with Open Badges, explained as a series of screen shots.

Open Badges can be used as a beta service in Mozilla's Open Badges Backpack service at beta.openbadges.org. After logging in, you'll see your badges. At the beginning there are none.

You can start earning badges in P2PU's School of Webcraft, for example. So create an account, join the school, and complete some of the challenges. Note! It's best to use the same email address in both of these services just to keeps things nice and simple.

Here are some badges that I've earned at P2PU.

To get to your badges, you need to go to your P2PU profile page, shown here, and click on "Edit profile".

In your profile editor you can do lots of things. But the new option is "Share Badges". Choose that.

This is the part that is still under development. In the future you could download your badges as images (which would contain some of the badge metadata so they are not just normal images). But for now you can only send your badges to the Mozilla Open Badge Backpack, which is the service you saw in the first picture. Go ahead and send.

You get a verification screen showing how many badges will be sent. Continue.

You're now in Mozilla's Open Badges Backpack. It will go through all of the badges you sent and ask if you want to include them or not.

Once you've accepted the badges, your home page now shows the badges you have. But no-one else can see them yet. Drag some of them into an empty group area on the right, edit the group to include some explanation and other things, and presto, you have a sharable page that shows your badges that anyone can verify. Check out my badge page.

OK, so what’s this all about? Well, in this case the issuer of the badges, P2PU, has seen that I’ve accomplished some tasks that they consider useful. They’ve awarded badges for me. I can take those badges and transfer them to Mozilla’s Backpack service. In the future I will be able to store my badges anywhere I want, even as individual image files. I could add them to my own blog, or any other location online that seems suitable. Others can click on the badges to see who awarded the badge to me, and where the publicly visible evidence is that I indeed did receive this badge. While faking certificates is in theory always possible, this makes copying of badge images not very useful, since to properly have a badge from P2PU or any other organization, that issuer will have a public record of who has received this badge.

So the interesting question of course (still) is: As formal educations institutions have already lost their monopoly on knowledge (eg. Wikipedia) and on teaching (eg. P2PU), the only thing they have left is accreditation, or certifying that people have accomplished some learning goals. Does this Mozilla project take away this monopoly from them? It certainly seems possible. What then? Certainly universities can still award their diplomas, but so can anyone else. It’s just a matter of what is credible and suitable for each situation. But I could imagine awarding badges to teachers that have been in my copyright workshops, for example.