Mozilla Open Badges

History

In 2011, the Mozilla Foundation announced their plan to develop an open technical standard called Open Badges to create and build a common system for the issuance, collection, and display of digital badges on multiple instructional sites.

To launch the Open Badges project, Mozilla and MacArthur engaged with over 300 nonprofit organizations, government agencies and others about informal learning, breaking down education monopolies and fuelling individual motivation. Much of this work was guided by "Open Badges for Lifelong Learning", an early working paper created by Mozilla and the MacArthur Foundation.

In 2012, Mozilla launched Open Badges 1.0 and partnered with the City of Chicago to launch The Chicago Summer of Learning (CSOL), a badges initiative to keep local youth ages four to 24 active and engaged during the summer. Institutions and organizations like Purdue University, MOUSE and the UK-based DigitalME adopted badges, and Mozilla saw international interest in badging programs from Australia and Italy to China and Scotland.

By 2013, over 1,450 organizations were issuing Open Badges and Mozilla's partnership with Chicago had grown into the Cities of Learning Initiative, an opportunity to apply CSOL's success across the country.

In 2014, Mozilla launched the Badge Alliance, a network of organizations and individuals committed to building the open badging ecosystem and advancing the Open Badges specification. Founding members include Mozilla, the MacArthur Foundation, DigitalME, Sprout Fund, and Blackboard. More than 650 organizations from six continents signed up through the Badge Alliance to contribute to the Open Badges ecosystem.

In 2015, the Badge Alliance spun out of Mozilla and became a part of MacArthur Foundation spin off, Collective Shift - a nonprofit devoted to redesigning social systems for a connected world. Later that year, Collective Shift partnered with Concentric Sky to develop Open Badges 2.0. That same year, Concentric Sky launched the open source project Badgr to serve as a reference implementation for Open Badges.{{Cite web|url=http://www.edcircuit.com/ieee-consortium-learning-engineering-attracting-leading-charter-members/|title= IEEE Consortium for Learning Engineering is Attracting Leading Charter Members|website=edcircuit.com|publisher=edCircuit|date=30 December 2017}} The Badgr Server is written in Python using the Django framework; source code is available under version 3 of the GNU Affero General Public License.

In early 2016, IMS Global announced their commitment to Open Badges as an interoperable standard for digital credentials, and in late 2016, Mozilla announced that stewardship of the Open Badges standard would transition officially to IMS Global.

In late 2018, Mozilla announced that it would retire the Mozilla Backpack program that enabled users to collect and showcase their Open Badge credentials and migrate all users to Concentric Sky's open source Badgr platform.

Technical details

Open Badges are designed to serve a broad range of digital badge use cases, including both academic and non-academic uses. The core Open Badge specification is made up of three types of Badge Objects:

; Assertion : Represents an awarded badge. It contains information about a single badge that belongs to an individual earner. ; BadgeClass : Contains information about the accomplishment(s) a specific badge recognizes. As the same badge may be awarded to many earners, there may be many Assertions that correspond to a single BadgeClass. ; IssuerOrganization : Contains a collection of information about the entity (e.g., person, organization) which issued a badge.

Beginning with version 1.1, valid JSON-LD must be used for Open Badges.

An exploratory prototype draft xAPI vocabulary has been defined so that Open Badges may be referenceable from Experience API activity streams.

References

References

1. Ash, Katie. (2012-06-13). "'Digital Badges' Would Represent Students' Skill Acquisition". Education Week.
2. Surman, Mark. (2011-09-15). "Mozilla Launches Open Badges Project".
3. (2023-10-20). "Open Badges Explained: Revolutionizing Skills Recognition {{!}} Sertifier".
4. "Open Badges Standard". Badge Alliance.
5. (2016-10-28). "IMS Global, Mozilla Foundation, and LRNG Announce Next Steps to Accelerate the Evolution of the Open Badges Standard". IMS Global Learning Consortium, Inc..
6. (2019-03-12). "Who Owns Digital Badges? A Company's Patent on Credential System Raises Questions - EdSurge News".
7. (27 August 2012). "Open Badges for Lifelong Learning".
8. Ong, Josh. (2013-03-14). "Mozilla Launches Version 1.0 of Its Open Badges Certification Standard".
9. "Horizon Report 2015 K-12 Edition".
10. Surman, Mark. (29 January 2016). "Mozilla's Continued Commitment to Open Badges". Mozilla Foundation.
11. jade. (23 June 2014). "Welcome to the Badge Alliance!".
12. "About the Badge Alliance".
13. (2016-01-29). "Mozilla's Continued Commitment to Open Badges".
14. (6 October 2015). "MacArthur Spins Off Digital Media & Learning Work with $25 Million Seed Investment". MacArthur Foundation.
15. Surman, Mark. (2018-08-15). "An Update on Badges and Backpack".
16. (27 October 2015). "Badgr Server Readme". Concentric Sky.
17. "concentricsky/badgr-server".
18. (9 April 2015). "badgr-server/LICENSE".
19. Abel, Rob. (16 February 2016). "IMS Global Learning Consortium's Commitment to Open Badges for Education". IMS Global Learning Consortium, Inc..
20. Wiggers, Kyle. (2019-04-24). "Credly raises $11.1 million to issue and manage digital badges".
21. "Digital Badges vs. Open Badges".
22. (1 May 2015). "Open Badges Technical Specification (version 1.1)". Badge Alliance.
23. "Open Badges Extensions". Badge Alliance.
24. "Open Badges xAPI Vocabulary". Badge Alliance.