Open Badges 2.0: Updates to the Open Badges Standard

On Monday 19th June, Open Badge Factory hosted a webinar on how both Open Badge Factory and Open Badge Passport are now compliant with the new Open Badges 2.0 standard (which was developed and released in late 2016/early 2017). As would be expected from anything containing ‘2.0’ in the title, the new standard incorporates more social and ‘connected’ elements, allowing users to do things like ‘follow’ each other on platforms such as Open Badge Passport. You can also now create multilingual badges in Open Badge Factory.
For more of the techy specification stuff, you can follow the link to the Open Badges Specification Github. Doug Belshaw (one of the original developers of the Open Badges standard) has also provided some thoughts on Open Badges 2.0 on his blog.
Here at York St John, we have a licence for Open Badge Factory (a platform for setting up and issuing badges) and we encourage our staff and students to use OBF’s partner platform, Open Badge Passport, for storing and showcasing their badges. We prefer Open Badge Passport (OBP) for showcasing badges because of the easy way it connects with platforms such as LinkedIn and because you can add multiple email addresses to your OBP account – meaning that badges earned to your professional, student and personal email addresses can all be stored in the same place. There are plenty of other Open Badge platforms out there, though (the beauty of an open infrastructure), so you may already be using other platforms such as Badgr, openbadges.me or Open Badges Backpack. The TEL Team can provide advice and guidance on Open Badges more generally and if you want to discuss your ideas, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
In terms of the new 2.0 standard and how Open Badge Factory are now compliant with it, here are the highlights from the webinar:

What’s new, now?

1. Open Badge Passport can now receive badges that have been created with the new 2.0 standard.
2. Multilingual badges can now be created in Open Badge Factory (OBF). There are currently 27 languages to choose from.
3. There is now a ‘Shared Profiles’ section in Open Badge Passport, where you can follow other users of the platform and see which badges you have in common. When users you follow upload and publish new badges onto their profiles, you will see this in your ‘Notifications’ section.
4. In your ‘Gallery’ of badges in Open Badge Passport, you can now see other publicly visible recipients of the badges you have, and check their respective badge galleries.

What’s coming soon?

1. More languages will be added to Open Badge Factory’s creator wizard.
2. Improvements to the user interface for OBP and OBF.
3. Minor bug fixes to OBP.
4. Multilingual badge applications.
5. Endorsements.
6. More social interaction and usability in OBP.

The slides from Open Badge Factory’s webinar are embedded below, and you can watch a recording of the webinar from the OBF Academy website.