Hi, I'm very pleased to announce that Totara Learning Solutions (the distributors of the corporate distro of Moodle called TotaraLMS) will be developing an Open Badges solution for Moodle and Mahara. The "Moodle as Issuer, Mahara as Displayer" project will integrate Mozilla's "Open Badges" software to issue, manage and display digital badges in Moodle and 3rd party sites such as social media and also eportfolio systems - we'll develop a solutions for Mahara. We will use Moodle.or to collaborate and get feedback on the specs and of course all the new software will be released as open source to Moodle (ideally integrated into core) . All users of Moodle, in all the different contexts, stand to benefit from this initiative.
As some folk know, I've been involved in a number of significant Moodle based projects over the years including MyMoodle and Moodle Networks (Mnet) and I lead the Mahara project, and also Totara Learning Solutions so it's great to be doing this project. We're strong believers in the transformative nature of open source infrastructure and open badges has some amazing potential.
Although, the architecture has yet to be finalised, the high level thinking goes as follows at this stage. Please bear in mind that we will work closely with Moodle HQ and Catalyst also, as we have historically done. On this occasion we will also be working with Mozilla.
- Issuing badges will leverage Moodle’s Activity and Course completion functionality. We are the maintainers of Course completion.
- It is likely we will develop a significantly updated and modified version of the Certificate module, that will dispense Open Badge PNGs instead of PDF files.
- Badges will be stored in Moodle and can also be downloadable by users once they have earned them.
- A web service (open to all, no authentication needed) will be provided to help displayers verify the authenticity of badges issued by a specific Moodle site.
- On the display side, we will create a new block for Moodle that users will be able to place on their profile page. It will be a similar version to the Mahara block and will use the same underlying library for interacting with the Open Badges API.
- We will use the Moodle Portfolio API to push badges automatically to Mahara.
About Open Badges
Learning today happens everywhere but it's often difficult to get recognition for skills and achievements gained outside of formal education and training contexts. Mozilla's Open Badges project is working to solve that problem, making it easy for any organization or learning community to issue, earn and display badges across the web. The result: recognizing 21st century skills, unlocking career and educational opportunities, and helping learners everywhere level up in their life and work.
The Badges for Lifelong Learning Competition brought together Web developers, designers and technologists with educators, online learning innovators and collaborators that range from NASA, the U.S. Department of Education and the Girl Scouts of America to Intel, Disney-Pixar and Motorola.
The goal: explore how digital badges can provide learners of all ages new ways to gain 21st century skills, harness the full educational power of the Internet, and unlock career and learning opportunities in the real world.
For more information visit: www.openbadges.org
cheers
Richard
