Announcement

IACET Implements Open Digital Badges

IACET recently began issuing open digital badges to learners successfully completing its Instructional Design and Facilitation for Adult Learning and Education Standards for the 21^st Century programs.

Issuing digital badges provides learners with the opportunity to receive a far more dynamic and useful credential than traditional hardcopy certificates.  For example, upon receiving a hardcopy certificate, a learner may hang the certificate on their wall, if you are lucky, or make a copy of it for their portfolio.  More times than not, certificates get placed in a dark file folder where it may or may not be used in the future.  With open digital badges, badges are electronically issued and contain an attractive “seal” that displays the earner’s accomplishment. However, an open digital badge is far more than just an attractive image that shows a seal.  An open digital badge also contains metadata that contains far more information than traditional hardcopy certificates.  Open digital badges contain not only basic information, like the person’s name, accomplishment and a control number, but can also contain more detailed information such as course outcomes, exam requirements, or links to evidence that validate the learning experience. 

Learners can then post the digital badge on their web pages, email signatures, LinkedIn or other social media profiles and any number of other digital locations.  Essentially, the digital badge takes on a life of its own where numerous people can examine the credential earned by the recipient and learn the details about what it took to earn the badge.  In addition, the training provider also receives some big benefits.  IACET recently offered over a 100 digital badges to learners who completed the respective training events.  Tracking data shows those badges were shared on social media sites and viewed more than 2,000 times as of this publication.  The provider and learner receive far more exposure from a digital badge than a traditional hard copy certificate.  When learners share their digital badge, not only does it promote them, it also promotes the training provider’s program.

The benefits of digital badging go far beyond the benefits communicated here.  Without question, open digital badges are affecting the continuing education and training environments our accredited providers compete in every day.  To assist our providers in learning more about this innovation, IACET has invested in developing a standard for open digital badges.  The new Open Digital Badging Standard will evaluate the meta data of the badge to ensure the badge is robust and meaningful to communicate quality in continuing education programs.  This is just one more way IACET is affecting the continuing education and training ecosystem across the globe.  Stay tuned for more information as the IACET Standard for Open Digital Badges is rolled out later in the Summer.

If you recently earned an open digital badge and want to verify the integrity of its open framework you can use a new IACET Badge Verification tool located at IACET.org, RESOURCES, IACET OpenBadge Verification Tool or just click here.