Badges/bsd/wiki

Introduction

Badge system design is rooted in understanding how badges come together to form a system. There are a variety of approaches and we're interested in cataloguing them all here. This wiki is the framework for building a toolkit to help people understand badge system design. This is where you come in: add your use cases, your definitions of terms, your techniques, your questions, etc.

Getting involved

There are several ways to get involved and give feedback on the standard:

• Add your content below!
• Join us for our regular research / system design calls
• Discuss badge system design on the Open Badges list
• Use the #badgesys hashtag

Aspects of badge system design

System goals

There are many reasons for developing a badge system, let's use this spot to write down the goals of possible badge systems. Your goals may or may not be directly related to specific badges. What are yours? Specificity is important but if your badge system has multiple goals, please indicate that as well.

• Connect community
• Recognize contributions/achievements
• Help participants advertise their skills
• Consider how many badges is a good number for a system?

Lenses

There are a number of ways to look at a badge system. One is from the issuer standpoint, another is from the earner standpoint. Depending on which lens you're wearing, a badge system can look entirely different. A lens may reveal certain information about consideration requirements for possible audiences.

• issuing lens
  • individual issuer
  • organizational issuer
• earning lens
  • individual earner
  • social community
• sharing / displaying lens
  • consuming public
  • public at large

Funding

Many badge systems begin with external funding. Even if your badge system has internal funding to drive it, staffing, tech, and maintenance are significant funding considerations. In this section we'll investigate potential sources of funding as well as areas that need special funding considerations.

Funding considerations

• staff (building including writers, designers, assessment experts, content experts, etc.)
• tech
• maintenance

Sources of funding

• governmental
• philanthropic
• private / internal

Use cases

There are a variety of use cases that we're seeing in the badge system design world. Different from system goals, these define who might design badge systems.

Dan Hickey and his team of graduate students, Katerina Schenke and Cathy Tran, have investigated some options and you can read more about their work in this HASTAC blog post or the original post found on Dan's Remediating Assessment site. At a later date, we'll unpack them from that post and post here.

• Community recognition / development
• Academic advancement
• Professional development
• Endorsement

Personas

There are thousands of possible personas, let's consider them and how they might relate to use cases. Each system context will have its own combination of stakeholders.

• individuals
• organisations
• entities
• relationships
• (things that have definitive email addresses :-)

Tools + their uses

There are a number of tools being created to help people develop and implement badge systems. Here are a few that people have been kind enough to share with us. If you have additional tools, please include them below and indicate their use. As we add more, we'll begin to categorize them to ease discovery.

• Badge System Design worksheet
  • The Badge System Design worksheet is a google spreadsheet that prompts the designer to consider as many areas of a badge system as possible in the developmental stages. By reviewing it prior to building, it underscores many, if not all of the areas to be considered in the construction of a robust badge system.
• DigitalME Badge Design Canvas
  • The Badge Design Canvas seeks to simplify the process of developing a badge system by bringing it into the analogue world. This document is intended to be printed out and written upon. A brief encapsulation of important aspects of badge creation and design.
• Nate Otto's Design Principles Documentation card deck
  • The DPD card deck turns the building of a badge system into a type of game. By shuffling through the deck and selecting different cards, different areas of import can be investigated and addressed.
• Badg.us

Badge types

There are a number of badge types, let's consider what they are and how they might be used. Is there a default type of badge?

• attendance
• participation
• learning
• skill
• achievement
• affiliation

Levels

This needs to have context added. Not everyone needs to have levels.

• beginner
• intermediate
• advanced
• expert

Limits

Questions about meaning and value arise frequently in the development of badge systems. One possible response to this is to limit the total number of badges in your system. Alternatively, you can ignore limits and badge as appropriate. This area is ripe for discussion.

Badge criteria

Are there different ways to write about your content? Let's cover that here:

Alignments

Some badges may align with standards, some learning, some professional. This is the area to think through what those alignments might be.

Academic

• common core
• web literacy standard

Licensing

Creative Commons considerations around badges materials and reuse.