Educational Badging: Certification Systems, Planning and Design

Diane Gavin, Executive Director – Center for Academic Innovation, Texas A&M University-San Antonio

In this article, Diane Gavin outlines the critical elements of designing effective digital badging systems in education and workforce development. She explains how meaningful credentials, interoperability and technical standards like Open Badges ensure long-term usability and trust. The piece is a practical guide for creating scalable, verifiable and skill-driven micro-credentials.

Micro credentialing’s flexibility, affordability and ability to meet the evolving needs for just-in-time learning in the workforce and higher education are unquestionable. However, not all educational badges or certification systems are created equally. A poorly designed digital badging or certification system ruins everyone's experience.

To avoid making a mistake, five fundamental issues exist when creating digital badging for your courses:

• Meaningful Credentialing: Ensure badges stand for genuine skill acquisition or achievements rather than for participation. Design credentials that have recognizable value to employers and the broader education community. The credential should communicate what competencies or skills the learner has shown.

• Technical Standards and Interoperability: Adopt established standards like Open Badges to ensure badges can be readily displayed, shared and verified across platforms. This interoperability allows learners to highlight their achievements through digital portfolios, social media and professional networking sites.

• Assessment Integrity: Implement robust verification methods for credential validity. Consider how to authenticate the badge earner who showed the required skills through proctored assessments, multi-stage verification, or project-based demonstrations of competence.

• Learner Motivation and Engagement: Design badging systems to enhance intrinsic motivation rather than focusing on extrinsic rewards. Create progression pathways encouraging continuous learning, perhaps with badges building toward larger certifications.

• Metadata and Evidence: Include rich metadata with each badge that details the skills assessed, evaluation criteria, issuing organization and validity period. Consider attaching evidence of the learner's work, allowing credential recipients to show precisely what they did to earn the badge.

The technical foundation of digital badges is crucial for ensuring badges function across systems and maintain their value over time.

“Open badges are digital badges that are verifiable, portable and packed with information about a holder’s skills and achievements. The Open Badges Standard is the most widely adopted framework to generate open badges”

Educational technologists should also consider the following areas to ensure badges are usable beyond a limited period.

Plan for Key Interoperability Considerations

Before offering badges, educational technologists should generate a plan for interoperability concerns. Interoperability refers to the ability of different systems to recognize and exchange badges effectively, ensuring that badges issued by one platform can be easily shared and verified on another. This is crucial for helping learner mobility, allowing learners to highlight their achievements across different platforms and enabling institutions and employers to recognize and use these digital credentials.

Several interoperability considerations for offering badges are as follows:

• Verification Protocols: Use cryptographic verification within the badge so third parties can confirm authenticity without contacting the original issuer. Cryptographic verification allows algorithms to verify the badge's authenticity and integrity.

• Badge Portability: Select dedicated badge platforms like Accredible, Credly, or Badgr to ensure badges can be exported and imported across platforms like Moodle, Canvas, Blackboard and LinkedIn.

• API Integration: Build Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that allow badges to connect with Learning Management Systems, human Resource Information Systems, job applicant tracking systems, digital portfolios and professional networking sites that students, faculty, or employees may use.

• Metadata Standards: Adopt consistent vocabulary for skills taxonomies like CASE Network or O*NET to ensure badges can be appropriately matched to job requirements.

• Blockchain Integration: Consider emerging blockchain-based credentialing systems for permanent, tamper-proof verification independent of an institution's continued existence. Blockchain badging is a concept that offers a public register or bulletin board of recipients’ badges and digital certifications. With colleges, universities and organizations merging or closing, blockchain-based credentialing systems allow recipients to have an ongoing repository for displaying their skills.

Consider Following the Open Badges Standard

To generate interoperability considerations, consider following the Open Badges Standard. Open badges are digital badges that are verifiable, portable and packed with information about a holder’s skills and achievements. The Open Badges Standard is the most widely adopted framework for generating open badges. The Open Badges Standard defines three areas:

• Badge Structure: Use JSON-LD (JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data) formatted data that includes issuer information, criteria, recipient details and verification methods.

• Badge Images: Create a visual representation with embedded metadata

• Badge Backpack: Offer badge backpacks as a way for earners to collect, manage and share badges from multiple issuers

Follow Badging Implementation Best Practices

Once the decision is made to generate badges, the key interoperability considerations when offering badges are in place, the Open Badges Standard is consulted, and badging implementation best practices are set up. Current best practices for badging implementation include

• Running interoperability tests across multiple platforms before full deployment

• Documenting your technical implementation to help third-party vendors or sites understand how to verify and display your credentials

• Considering accessibility requirements in both the visual design and metadata structure to meet the 2026 Title II ADA standards

• Implementing versioning protocols for when badge criteria or standards evolve

• Developing a technical governance plan for supporting badge validity as technology changes

By creating a badging protocol, educational technologists ensure that digital badges remain useful and represent the skills that learners have achieved.

Blockchain

Human Resource

Learning Management