Digital Badges often indicate talents such as an experience in a technical solution, business acumen, or leadership qualities, or they could be for a campaign you took part in or a cause you supported with the digital badge. Digital Badges, in general, are a digital and graphical depiction of both hard skills and soft skills.

The most widely used digital badge standard is the open badge, with multitudes of technological platforms using it. Open Badges can be verified by a third person and can be shared on different social media. They include sufficient details about the mastery as well as what the recipient performed to obtain the digital badge.

Are you aware, however, that to issue a digital badge, the IMS Global Learning Consortium has established some standards? Let’s look at what they are and what they mean.

IMS Global Learning Consortium Digital Open Badge Standards:

What they are:

The Open Badges standard defines a mechanism for collecting overall performance data and integrating this into accessible image data as digital badges, as well as web-based evaluation and verification resources. Open Badges specify who acquired it, who awarded it, the requirements, in many cases, documentation and demonstration of the essential skills.

The Open Badge standard is a critical component in the digital credentials ecosystem. Open badges system managed and advanced by the IMS Global Learning Consortium. Open Badges ‘2.X’ is intended to be compatible and interoperable with other IMS digital credentialing standards, such as the Comprehensive Learner Record and Competencies (CLRC) and Academic Standards Exchange (CASE) standards.

What they mean:

The IMS Global Learning Consortium’s Open Badges standard ensures the level of transparency and mobility of Digital Badges. The standard validates the learner’s and issuing institution’s identification, as well as the digital badge’s legitimacy as a measure of learners ’ academic achievement and the criterion with which it is established, and allows the digital badge and its information to be freely and openly shared.

Its Significance:

Employers are increasingly accepting badges as a form of evaluating potential employees, according to recent studies. Furthermore, institutions will collaborate with employers to create digital badges tailored to the needs of the workforce.

These digital badges will display evidence of quantitative measurements for the academic achievement through the identification of criterion metrics, evaluation details, learner’s data, linkage with external workflows, and training details because Open Digital Badges give learners control over wanting to share their digital badges and conversing their significance to academic institutions and future employers. Employers will benefit from this in terms of transparency and authenticity.