Mozilla

After 18 months in the darkness of beta world, Mozilla’s Open Badges project stepped out into the light recently with the unveiling of Open Badges 1.0.

But will the concept of organizations bestowing their own virtual endorsements for the mastery of skills hold up to critical examination from a world that, even in an information economy, demands most of its skilled workers hold a framed degree?

The list of more than 600 badge-creating and -designing partners would suggest so. Especially when that list includes names familiar even to digital-phobes, like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, multiple branches of the Smithsonian, NASA, and Disney-Pixar.

Yet even Erin Knight, the Mozilla Foundation’s senior director of learning, concedes it may be a while before badges resonate the same as a resume to an admissions or recruiting office, even if badges have the potential to be more authentic and certifiable.

“I don’t see badges replacing degrees as something that is going to happen tomorrow,” Knight says. “But I see it as more incremental.”

The idea behind Mozilla’s project, Knight says, is to create a common currency of how badges are structured and discussed. While Mozilla can’t — nor does it want to — control the quality of the elements required for badges listed within its project, it does require every badge to provide authentication for the organization issuing the badge and for the user receiving it, as well as a link to the criteria needed to earn it and the evidence of the learner meeting that criteria.

But the first incremental step to fostering a public understanding of what badges can offer may not be a top-down, widespread knowledge of the anatomy of a badge. Instead, judging by the stories of a few of Mozilla’s early partners, it may be local organizations explaining and publicizing their badge system to partner organizations they trust.

The Providence After School Alliance, or PASA, in Providence, Rhode Island, has reached an agreement with the city school district that badges issued to high school students for the completion of a semester-long course will count as a high school credit in extended learning.

Often, that credit isn’t needed for a graduation requirement. But it does find its way onto a high school transcript as its reviewed by a college admissions office.

“It is important to have a college admissions officer have it on a transcript,” says Patrick Duhon, PASA’s director of expanded learning, “because it’s a secondary validation.”

PASA has also succeeded in convincing Rhode Island College to include a section for students to link to their individual badges to a common college application after personally visiting the school to show the development of their badges.

“We would like to get to a place where all the colleges in Rhode Island would accept that,” said Hillary Salmons, PASA’s executive director. “But we’re building this and flying this. We don’t have the opportunity to go to every other admissions office and introduce this conceptually.”

Meanwhile, Digital On-Ramps, an initiative in Philadelphia focused on delivering career-focused training via online and mobile content, is using badges to help apply a credential to the skills learned by its users in three areas: 21st-Century skills and digital literacy; professional vocational certifications; and community leadership.

Initiative organizer Lisa Nutter, the president at nonprofit youth development organization Philadelphia Academies Inc. and wife of city mayor Michael Nutter, says the badge process will only be successful with a concerted effort to explain it to community schools and businesses.

“We basically have been preparing ourselves to put in a lot of energy in capacity building around this, both inside and outside of schools,” Nutter said.

Here’s a look at a few other badges in development and the weight they are expected to carry:

• NASA is working on launching badges in robotics and in the STEM fields to be earned through working with NASA content and used to identify candidates for internships and jobs.
• The Manufacturing Institute is developing a badge to be earned by current workers and students to demonstrate skills necessary to succeed in an advanced manufacturing job or internship.
• The Intel Society for Science and the Public is developing badges to affirm and evaluate scientific research and tie it to professional and academic skills.
• Carnegie Mellon is developing badges that will eventually be issued on a curricular path that terminates in certifications recognized by computer science and STEM industries.
• Badges for Vets is creating a series of badges that will help offer civilian-applicable credentials for professional skills learned through military training.

The Mozilla Foundation and Peer-to-Peer University (P2PU), among others, are working to take the idea of merit-earned badges and build a framework around which they can be used as alternative but accepted forms of certification.

The main premise behind this idea, the argument goes, is that the institutions and organizations traditionally responsible for accreditation no longer match the realities of what learning looks like today. For example, holding a bachelor’s degree in computer science is not necessarily an indication that you’re skilled in JavaScript, that you are an experienced project manager, that you’ve contributed to an open source project, or that you work well with virtual teams.

To that end, the Open Badges Project is working to build a system by which all sorts of skills and competencies can be tracked, assessed, and through badges, showcased and recognized. Currently the project is under development with the open-education organization P2PU.

Opening up certification and accreditation this way is a massive undertaking, and as the project’s lead Erin Knight notes on her blog, doing so raises a lot of questions:

What skills should we assess? Are there skills that are better left unassessed? What do we want to encourage? How do we avoid encouraging the “wrong” behavior? Who gets to decide which skills to assess? How much influence should outside stakeholders, such as employers, have on badges? Should they be able to design assessments and badges that are relevant to them? How can we let them have a say without creating an imbalance in the system or constraining the learning? How granular should badges be? … Should badges expire? How do we deal with skills that need to be refreshed or renewed? … Will these badges translate to formal learning environments? And if so, how? What would be required to make schools or institutions value or accept badges? Can we meet those requirements without changing the nature of the learning environments?

None of these are easy questions to answer. But moving forward, the Open Badges Project is focusing on making the framework as open as possible. Last week, the project announced the alpha version of its Open Badges Infrastructure. It’s important that the project support badges offered by any organization across the Web, but it’s also important that recipients be able to collect all their badges in one central place — one that they control, in a format that they can take to job interviews or post online (to their blog, for example, or to their LinkedIn profile).

As the image above demonstrates, these badges aren’t simply a graphic that you can download and past into a document. The badges contain metadata from the issuing organization (whatever that organization may be — it needn’t be a “formal” school) so that, while open, this badging system is verifiable and is linked to some type of assessment.

What this assessment will look like will surely be quite different from a “traditional” grading system. After all, the Open Badges Project is looking for a way to track all the various skills we gain outside the classroom, skills that don’t come with an A or a B letter grade.

The Open Badges Infrastructure will be moving to beta next month and will include a “Badge Backpack” for badge management as well as a widget to display badges. A full public launch is expected early next year. It’s a solid first step towards the goals of the larger Open Badges Project — the creation of an ecosystem whereby assessment and accreditation can recognize the new ways in which we learn.