Digital Badges – What They Are, How They Work and What They Mean

Digital badges can be powerful symbols of achievement, skill and employability. What are digital badges? How do they
differ from, say, an image of a badge? What value do they deliver and to whom? In this information-rich Credentialate Guide you’ll learn the history of digital badges, understand the technology that sits behind them and discover the benefits, challenges and opportunity digital badges present.

The Essentials: Digital badges

• What’s a digital badge?
  Digital badges are an indicator of accomplishment, skill, quality or interest that can be displayed, accessed and verified online. Quite simply, they’re visual emblems of achievement in digital format. Digital badges are earned in a variety ways, for a variety of achivement levels – ‘low stakes’ event participation to ‘high stakes’ achievements, such as successfully completing a collaborative project.
• How did digital badges get started?
  Their roots began in the video-game industry. Computer programmer Nick Pelling coined the term “gamification” and was the first to apply video game challenges and experience to real life processes. 
  
• How do badges work?
  Digital badges have embedded metadata that provide richer validation of qualifications. They contain shareable information about the badge issuer, receiver, criteria for issuing, issue date, expiration date, standards adhered to and evidence of achievement.
  
• What makes digital badges valuable?
  The right badges represent validated skills of the type that employers are hungry for. They’re easy to produce, manage and share. Badges make hiring practices better, as they allow organisations to take a more evidence-based approach. Through gamification, badges increase learner engagement and boost participation in training and HR programs. Best of all, digital badges demonstrate superior value over traditional credentials in the granular details of achievements.
  
• What are the challenges when using digital badges?
  When formal evaluation and scoring is separated from the issuing of badges, the process becomes too arduous for educators as they scale. In some instances, badges are locked into the Learning Management System, effectively eliminating market visibility. Badge credibility suffers if the issuer is not authorative in the market. ‘Bad badges’ cause confusion and it can be hard for stakeholders to know which digital badges to trust. 
• How Credentialate provides a new perspective
  Credentialate is the world’s first Credential Evidence Platform. It helps you discover and share evidence of workplace skills. Credentialate is the only Credential Evidence Platform that includes personalised qualitative, quantitative and artefact evidence record verified directly from within the digital badge. For institutions, educators can map and manage their skills infrastructure and track skills attainment across the institution and against existing frameworks.

The Full Story: What digital badges are, how they work, what they recognise and why they’re valuable

• What’s a digital badge?
• How did digital badges get started?
• How do badges work?
• What makes digital badges valuable?
• What are the challenges when using digital badges?
• How Credentialate provides a new perspective

Within the next decade, two thirds of all jobs will be “soft-skill” intensive. However, a quarter of entry-level employers reported difficulty hiring talent because applicants lacked precisely those skills. Those that did have them were snapped up as quickly as the potential employers could verify proof through applicants’ digital badges.

Soft skills are also known as “employability skills” or “enterprise skills”. More recently they became known as “power skills”. These skills are transferable between industries and occupations and are vital for success in any career. Soft skills include a broad range of abilities that include communication, critical thinking, judgment, teamwork, professional ethics, self-management and collaboration to name a few.

Two years ago, they gained significant interest and momentum in talent acquisition. The majority of HR leaders reported that they were becoming increasingly invested in achievements evidenced by digital badges. They were de-emphasizing degrees and prioritizing individual skills, or their hiring strategies headed in that direction.

With our rapidly evolving technology and work practices, many degree courses and traditional credentials become obsolete that much quicker. It has become imperative for job seekers and career professionals alike to ramp up their professional development with industry-specific skills.

Employers now highly prize work-integrated learning and credentials that are industry-aligned and employer-validated. Two thirds of HR leaders have declared that credentials earned online are on equal footing with credentials that were completed in person.

These trends have sparked a rush of credentialing and validation from both employees and employers. Nearly all the skills now in demand can be earned through micro-credential courses with digital badges for proof. They offer reliable and easily verifiable evidence that candidates have both power skills and the industry-specific skills that employers now look for intently.

What’s a digital badge?

Digital badges are an indicator of accomplishment, skill, quality or interest that can be displayed, accessed and verified online. Quite simply, they’re visual emblems of achievement.

Physical badges are proof of significant achievement in an organization, much like Scouts merit badges or military challenge coins. Like their physical counterparts, digital badges are powerful symbols for the achievement or membership that they claim to represent. Unlike physical badges, they’re information-rich and complex enough to withstand professional scrutiny and validation.

The term “digital badge” has been used interchangeably with digital credentials or micro-credentials. This is inaccurate and has led to some confusion about what they are. It would be better to say that a digital badge is a type of digital credential.

Digital credentials are simply the digital format of a type of paper credential. Think passports, driver’s licences, certificates of training completion and the like. It may prove qualification, completion, competence or clearance. The badge is often representative of a “micro-credential.” Micro-credentials certify the acquisition of a specific skill or set of skills that are usually earned to enhance employability.

There is a wide range of accomplishments that can be signified by a digital badge. Some badges credit “low stakes” achievements. These can be simple membership in an organisation, participation in an event, or engaging in a challenge 100 times. Other badges credit “high stakes” achievements such as developing and demonstrating critical thinking skills, passing a difficult accreditation process, or successfully completing a collaborative project.

Digital badges have enjoyed a great deal of recognition and popularity and for good reason. At their core, collecting and earning badges satisfies human needs for achievement, recognition and respect. It is important to note that all badges have a place in recognition of skills, so long as the intent behind the badge is transparent and that there is evidence (preferably personalised evidence) attached.

How did digital badges get started?

From professional and learning perspectives, the increased use of digital badges matched the rise of micro-credentials. Badges are shareable, easily verifiable proof of industry-specific skills. They’re sought by employees, employers, jobseekers and higher education institutions alike. But when did they start getting so popular?

Their roots lie with the first veterans of the video-game industry. In 2002, computer programmer Nick Pelling coined the term “gamification” while advocating the power of game mechanics in non-game scenarios. Pelling had two decades of computer game design under his belt. He was adamant that applying video game challenges and experience to real life processes could increase consumer engagement.

Foursquare was an early adopter of gamification. It was a search-and-discovery app that rewarded users for mapping locations in various cities. Users would rate restaurants and other places of interest. They would compete with others in a similar location and unlock digital badges. Huffington Post and others soon caught on to the badging system and adopted it too.

In 2005, Microsoft would establish the first implementation of an achievement system for its Xbox 360 console games. This began a five-year drive across industries to apply gamification and adopt the badges as marks of achievement. Unfortunately, many of these badges lacked transferability outside their issuer’s domain. This meant one could only copy and paste badge pictures, which didn’t promote much trust or verifiability.

The Mozilla Foundation would address this issue in 2011 with the release of its Open Badge System Framework. They acknowledged the significant impact that badges had on learning, achievement and community. Mozilla developed an open technical standard for issuing, collecting and displaying badges on multiple instructional sites. The following year, more than 1,400 companies joined the Open Badge system. It thrives to this day.

How do badges work?

Over 3,000 credentialing organisations have sprung up in the ten years since Mozilla established the first standards. Those organisations offer competing standards and digital credentials that are predominantly earned in a learning environment. The criteria and rubrics for them are determined by accredited instructors, higher learning institutions, national associations and credentialing bodies.

Digital badges are earned in various ways now. They prove competency in intermediate learning such as programming, cloud computing or project management. They recognise the development of specific, job-related skills during an internship. Badges can simply acknowledge membership in an exclusive group of individual’s common competencies or talents, like a football team or chess club. They also certify professional accomplishments over a period or as specified by the issuing body.

Currently, the most useful of these certifications is micro-credentialing. Digital badging is excellent for achieving new skills outside a degree course or for validating existing ones. It gives learners the edge in a competitive job market. They also give employers a plethora of options for attracting talent and developing it. Badges are visual emblems of certification like diplomas, but they offer more than proof of certification.

Paper diplomas are static credentials that rely on the brand of the issuing organisation to back up the stated qualifications. In this decade’s rapidly evolving technologies and jobs, they can quickly become obsolete. Degrees, certifications and skills can lose relevance because they aren’t adaptable to change.

Digital badges have embedded metadata that provide richer validation of qualifications. They contain shareable information about the badge issuer, receiver, criteria for issuing, issue date, expiration date, standards adhered to and evidence of achievement. They can even tell you whether the badge has been revoked and why. Overall, badges provide remarkable, timely, validated, dynamic evidence of the badge recipient’s claims of achievement.

What makes digital badges valuable?

The right badges represent validated skills of the type that employers are hungry for. They certify micro-credentials that build power skills and industry-specific skills that employers want. They’re easy to produce, manage and share. That makes them attractive to both the person seeking employment and the employer who’s looking for trusted, verifiable, digital proof.

Badges make hiring practices better. They allow companies to scale the hiring process, reduce unnecessary tests and take a more evidence-based approach to screening. This enables employers to fine-tune hiring practices predicting fit and performance that a traditional diploma can’t surface.

From an educational and training perspective, badges can add much value to the learning process. Through gamification, badges increase learner engagement. They’re used as rewards for learning achievement and recognition for completing arduous, sometimes unpalatable tasks. Organisations rely on badges to boost participation in training and HR programs. They also use them to encourage collaboration.

Passing different levels of assessments can earn badges. This is common with MOOCs as a way to show various “levels” of mastery that were gained over time. Badges are also used to recognise quality, indicate trust, or represent awards. Employers also consider these achievements and seek them out, making evidence of them more valuable.

Best of all, digital badges demonstrate superior value over traditional credentials in the granular details of surfaced achievements. They provide a more modular and flexible way of showing combination competencies and various levels of mastery.

How Credentialate provides a new perspective

Credentialate is a secure, configurable platform that assesses and tracks attainment of competencies and issues micro-credentials to students backed by personalised evidence at scale. By automatically extracting data from existing platforms and using an organisation’s own assessment rubrics, we can objectively measure awarding criteria and validate its evidence.

By this same method we can automate the assessment, monitoring, promotion and validation of evidence-backed skills. For an institution, we provide the data and insights required to track skills and competencies across courses and entire programs.

Finally, we have decades of collective experience in educational technology and long-standing ties with global educational powerhouses. These solidify our ability to produce credible digital badges.

Credentialate assesses, monitors, promotes and validates learners’ attainment of evidence-backed skills, supporting the transition from learner to earner. It is a secure, configurable platform that assesses and tracks attainment of competencies and issues micro-credentials to students. If you’d like to learn more About Us and how we can work together, contact us or Schedule a Demo and let’s discuss!