University of Canberra/SAFFIRE/Projects/Badges

Project
Digital badges provide an electronic method for issuing and displaying qualifications.

The Mozilla Open Badges scheme allows people to: evidence of skill and knowledge attainment.
 * 1) Earn
 * 2) Issue
 * 3) Display

Universities, particularly since the 20th century, have served an important role in facilitating learning, issuing and displaying qualifications.

UC emphasises graduate employablity and so should be striving to support students' professional online social presence, including digital badges, e-portfolio etc., and having the development of this integrated into course and unit curricula.

UC's learning management system, Moodle will be come "badge-capable" in 2014. First-steps could be badgify cross-faculty projects such as the Academic Integrity module, SmartStudy Passport, etc. and then develop a plan for wider implementation.

This is an example of a way that a higher education institution could develop work-integrated learning and market-relevance to degree offerings.

Potential advantages of a modular, badge-based higher education curriculum include:
 * 1) Immediate application/availability to job market/searching
 * 2) On-going feedback
 * 3) Multi-channel deployability - can be displayed on social media profiles etc.