Open Badges: From Recognition to Empowerment
ePIC is an annual convening for sharing and learning about open educational resources, open pedagogy, open recognition and open education initiatives.
This dynamic gathering celebrates the core values of open education that strive to realize education ecosystems that are accessible, affordable, equitable and inclusive to everyone, regardless of their background.
It welcomes participants and speakers from all continents and backgrounds to explore all dimensions of the emerging culture of recognition that has given rise to Open Badges.
This year again, fundamental questions were addressed around the recognition of experiences: what are the barriers to open recognition practices, what are the most recent technological achievements regarding Open Badges and to what extent do they contribute to fostering Open Recognition practices?
The conference was an ideal opportunity to discuss initiatives for the growth and expansion of “micro-credentials and digitalisation of badges” as a key of open recognition and to introduce Reveal, a project carried out as part of our commitment to the process of developing and implementing Open Recognition practices.
REVEAL is a multi-partner Erasmus+ project which aims to provide Local Recognition Networks (LRNs) practitioners with the means to make the recognition of informally acquired competencies possible and visible.
This project is part of the proposed solutions to the challenges impeding the realisation of open recognition.
The idea is to provide a tool to :
- Request/claim endorsement of selected informal skills within the community;
- Increase the visibility of these endorsements in the applicant’s profile
- Explore a range of skills
- Locate skills and view associated user profiles
This set of functionalities provided by iREVEAL (currently being conceptualised) is seen as a major breakthrough for individuals and communities struggling for visibility of informal skills. It would empower LRNs to work towards becoming active recognition and learning networks.
According to our vision of leveraging technology and related open data for open recognition, we have focused on updating the European Learning Model (ELM) and Europass as the infrastructure for digital credentials.
An overview of the European Commission policy on digitally signed certificates was presented with further details on initiatives undertaken such as:
- Europass: an approach to increase the transparency of qualifications and mobility of citizens in Europe;
- ELM (European learning model): this aims to support Europass in the exchange of learning data with external organisations.
We were pleased to share our dedication to making technology conducive to the dissemination of Open Recognition Practices and to providing our many clients and partners with the know-how and tools necessary to carry out their work in this area.
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.
