Open Badge Factory

Issue Your Open Badges Anywhere, Manage Them in One Place

Eric RousselleDiscendum Oy

11.04.2023

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Discendum Oy

• Finnish eLearning service provider• Our clients: educational, vocational establishments

and companies • Our services:

– Optima and Totara LMS– Kyvyt.fi ePortfolio

• Mahara and Totara partner

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What is Open Badge Factory?

• A cloud-based management system for Open Badge creators and issuers developed by Discendum

• A development project, the outcome will be the Open Badge Factory service

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Open Badges Concept in a Nutshell

• Developed by the Mozilla Foundation• ”A digital badge is an online representation of a skill

you’ve earned. ” (Source: openbadges.org)

• Granular, user centered, portable• New online standard to recognize and verify learning

(Open Badges Infrastructure)

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Roles and Architecture of the Open Badges Concept

Source: http://www.openbadges.org/en-US/about.html#how-it-works

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Discendum and Open Badges

• Discendum has been active in furthering the implementation on the Open Badges concept in Finland because it promotes the use of portfolios

• Kyvyt.fi ePortfolio’s Open Badges displayer released in November 2012

• Optima’s Open Badges creator and issuer tools released in January 2013

• About 100 badges have been issued using Optima

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What did we learn? • Many organizations understand the potential of the

Open Badges concept but also the risk of a negative impact on their brand and reputation

• Creating and issuing Open Badges require a strategy that should be defined and handled at the organization’s management level

• If badges are created and hosted on learning platforms or other systems, management of badges becomes fragmented

• It should be possible to issue badges from several systems, but organizations need to manage their badges in one place

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The Open Badge Factory’s architecture

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The Open Badge Factory Features

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Main Features

• Member organization authentication / certification of badges

• Users’ rights management• Badge creator tools• Issuer tools • Tracking system of issued badges• OBF Member community (sharing and endorsement of

badges)• Badge earners’s feedback system• OBF clients for Moodle, Mahara and Optima• Our own Open Badge backpack which is compatible

with other backpacks

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The OBF Project Schedules

• Starts officially on 1.8.2013• Release of the first version 15.1.2014• Piloting period from January to June 2014• Release of the final version December 2014

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Project Partners and Founder

• Discendum (development and coordination)• The Teacher Training School of Turku University

(piloting)• Kokkola University Consortium Chydenius (research

and consulting)• OK Study Center (piloting)• IlonaIT Oy (piloting)• Raisoft Oy (piloting)• Learning Agents Inc. (adviser)• Mozilla Foundation (adviser)• The Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and

Innovation

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Information and Contacts

Openbadgefactory.com

eric.rousselle@discendum.comheli.karjalainen@discendum.com