Advancing sustainable educational ecosystems with open digital credentials and badges

Abstract

Most existing practices for grading student work, measuring readiness, documenting accomplishment, and accrediting programs and schools are analog and opaque. This makes it difficult for programs, schools, and communities to adopt the innovations described in the other chapters of this volume. Open digital badges can contain specific claims of competency, along with web enable evidence supporting those claims. This information can then circulate in social networks and gain additional meaning. Examples from sustainable, sustainability, and open education are used to illustrate how open badges are being used to help find, acknowledge, recognize, motivate, and endorse learning.