Dipartimento:Wikiversità/Open Badges/Open Badges Proposal

In this page we propose the implementation of an Open Badges issuing policy for Wikiversity. The first part summarizes the key points of the Open Badges project, and the supporting infrastructure provided by the Mozilla Foundation. The second part proposes a way to use Open Badges to encourage and award mentorship, the formation of learning groups, and more generally to sustain a community focusing on collaborative learning on Wikiversity. The last part describes how this project aligns with Wikimedia's mission and guidelines, and discusses anticipated challenges and possible solutions.

Open Badges

The Mozilla Open Badges initiative is an effort aimed at encouraging and providing recognition of learning experiences in settings that go beyond traditional education. In short, badges represent achievements, from simple participation to evidence-backed competence, and they do so in a standard, globally accepted format. This provides a way to value informal educational experiences, and unlock concrete opportunities in life for talented learners all over the world. Today, over 3000 organizations are issuing badges for disparate purposes (e.g. schools, universities, companies, nonprofit organizations, government agencies, libraries, events and science fairs organizers).

Open Badges Ecosystem

• Any individual or organization can issue a badge and send it to a recipient (learner) via email.
• A learner collects badges from many different sources and upload them in services called backpack.
• A backpack permanently stores badges, verifies their authenticity, and allow the learner to selectively share his/her badges with consumers (e.g. employers, college admissions committees). Badges can be shared and displayed in many different other ways (e.g. websites, eportfolios, professional networks, job applications, social media) .
• Any individual or organization (including consumers) can verify the authenticity of a badge .
• Being an open standard, Open Badges can be moved and transferred to different services and backpacks. The user is in control of its own data .

Technical details

The standard is described in the Open Badges specification. In short, an Open Badge is composed by 4 files that must be hosted at a stable URL:

• An issuer profile: a JSON file containing information that uniquely identify the organization or the individual issuing the badge. This is typically shared for all the badges issued by an entity.
• A badge image: a PNG or SVG file, the "face" of the badge. This is typically unique for each badge class.
• A criteria description: a web page describing the criteria for earning the achievement. This is also unique for each badge class.
• A badge class: a JSON file including the badge name, description, criteria for earning, and the URL to the issuer profile, badge image, and criteria description files. This is unique for each type of badge.

Once this is in place, a badge can be awarded as another JSON file (called an assertion or a badge instance) that, for the purpose of being verified, must be

• Hosted at a stable URL: in this case it includes the URL at which the JSON file is hosted, or
• Encapsulated in a JSON web signature: the JSON file is encoded with a private signing key, and signed with the associated public verification key. In this case the issuing organization has to host a the public key at a stable URL, but it does not have to permanently host a separate JSON file for each badge instance.

The JSON assertion can be "baked" into the badge PNG or SVG metadata, so that a badge can be distributed to learners as a simple image files.

Wikiversity

• Many educational websites already have some badge system (Khan Academy proprietary, P2P university use Open Badges)
• They have proved to be very effective in motivating learners
• Wikiversity makes learning its primary goal and experiment with new ways for collaborative learning

Wikimedia

• To issue open badges we need platform that supports the Open Badges Specification

External links

• OpenBadges main website
• Open Badges specification