The Centre for Learning and Teaching (CLT), along with key stakeholders from across both academic departments and professional services units are piloting a digital badges service, with a view to introducing a centralised digital badge service for students and staff to recognise their personal and professional development achievements. This pilot is running in 2024/25 and will finalise its work with recommendations for a future digital badge service for the start of the 2025/26 academic year.
What are digital badges?
Digital badges, as the name suggests, are digital recognitions of achievement used by a variety of organisations, including Higher Education since being launched around 2011. Digital badges can be used to acknowledge and recognise externally an achievement by students, whether it be some formal or informal training recognition or skills development.
Digital badges offer a range of benefits to both students and staff in acknowledging a professional development achievement. For students this is particularly beneficial and links to the University’s strategic work on promoting employability. For example, students can promote their personal and professional development achievements by sharing their digital badges on platforms such as LinkedIn for prospective employers. Digital badges also help students build up a rich portfolio of their broader skills achievements such as leadership through project work and volunteering.
Digital badge pilot
Given the wide interest in digital badges, CLT has convened a digital badges steering group to oversee pilot implementations of issuing digital badges for students for non-credit bearing activity. The aim of the group is to investigate the possibility of creating a centrally coordinated digital badge service for the University and which will address four key areas:
- Validation – to ensure proper governance and compliance
- Administration – to develop a robust and manageable service
- Quality – to ensure appropriate quality standards
- Design – to define standards compliant with University branding
Our steering group consists of key stakeholders from across the university, including academics keen to acknowledge the achievements of their students, and professional services units who help develop a wide range of employability skills and want to help students promote their achievements to prospective employers.
Current Work
The digital badges steering group is piloting the use of digital badges this year to develop a service that is sustainable and fit for purpose. The aim is to create a service that will enable all future users to create their own badges for students and staff, which is administratively easy, has clear governance and meets expected quality standards.
Further information about our approach can be found here
Organisations using digital badges
There are numerous organisations already using digital badges so digital badges are well established in both industry and higher education. The University of Edinburgh already offers a digital badge service, as well as the Open University.
Digital badge providers
Digital badges were originally created as open source software i.e. free to use. It is still possible to create free badges, though a number of commercial services now exist that provide digital badge services. Two examples of commercial providers are shown below (though this is not an endorsement of their use).