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

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

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

• Badge System Design worksheet
• DigitalME Badge Design Canvas
• Nate Otto's Design Principles Documentation card deck

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

• 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