This action lab aims at providing hands-on experience with Open Badges (OBs) as novel means of recognising and credentialing knowledge, skills, competences, creativity and achievements in various learning settings (formal or informal, online or traditional classroom). OBs greatly contribute to the general trend of open education by enforcing an open approach to recognition of learning achievements, by providing open evidence of learning accomplishments, by open criteria for credentialing learning no matter where, when, and how it happens, by being based on an open technical standard and free software, as well as by enabling open displaying and sharing of one’s achievements.
The action lab will be based on experience and results of two European projects:
- GRASS (Grading Soft Skills), a 3-year research project being developed with the support of the Lifelong Learning Programme (LLP) of the European Commission. GRASS focuses on how OBs can be used to incite, assess, grade and recognise development of learners’ soft skills – creativity, innovation, critical thinking, decision making, communication, collaboration, etc. – spanning different ages and educational levels. Eight educational institutions from four different European countries are the GRASS project partners. Their starting point is a vision from an EU strategic document: “In the future, creativity, the ability to think laterally, adaptability and other ‘transversal’ skills will be valued more than the specific bodies of knowledge that schools have traditionally taught.”
- Open Badge Network (OBN), the strategic partnership founded under the European Commission Erasmus+ Program. The OBN is a project that brings together organisations from across Europe to support the development of an Open Badge ecosystem, promote the use of Open Badges to recognise non-formal and informal learning. The OBN project aims to provide a trusted source of independent information, tools and informed practice to support people who are interested in creating, issuing and earning badges across Europe. The crutial part of the workshop will be presentation of the results of the all OBN efforts to provide the best possible technical infrastructure for Open Badges in Europe, especially the Competency Repository for Open Badges, technical specification for European Open Badge Infrastructure’s development, collected use casas.
The participants in this action lab will engage in developing OBs on-the-spot, using open and free tools, in an informal setting, guided by 2-5 instructors. The lab is a mix of an OBs tutorial, brief showcases and demos of how OBs are used in practice (for awarding both soft and hard skills), brainstorming discussions, and possibly also a couple of presentations from members of the Open Badges community.
