Digital Badges
Digital Open Badges offer a way to communicate your achievements and strengths.
They are usually used online, but you can also use them on your CV to differentiate yourself from other graduates.
Digital Open Badges are being piloted in GMIT at present.
1. How Digital Open Badges work:
The type of activity/behaviour/learning that can be recognised with Digital Open Badges is unlimited.
You will be familiar with getting results from tests as a percentage grade, but how about getting a badge that proves you were an excellent team leader? Or an excellent communicator? Or that you excelled in a particular task? Or that your classmates nominated you for because you were very helpful to them?
Those are the kinds of achievements that may not be captured with a percentage grade, but which potential employers would be keen to see on your job application, and which would make your CV stand out.
2. Sharing Digital Open Badges:
A key aspect of digital open badges is that they are easily shared across various platforms.
For example, you could add your badges to an ePortfolio, to your LinkedIn profile, or to any social networking site that you like!
3. How Digital Open Badges are issued:
An open standard was developed by the Mozilla Foundation, which sets out a framework for creating, issuing and validating the badges.
An element of this standard approach is that the digital badge contains meta-data along with the image of the badge. This meta-data contains information such as:
- A description of the badge
- Who issued the it
- When it was issued
- Who it was issued to
- What criteria the recipient had to meet in order to obtain the badge
This validates the badge and ensures that only someone who has truly earned the badge can obtain and display it.
4. What our students say:
"The badges are a great idea. Even though I had set goals to achieve the best grade possible, the badge awarded gave me an incentive to work harder and push on when the workload got heavier. I can use the badge as proof when mentioning that I received 'Best in Class in Revit Architecture'. The badges can give students an edge and propel them above other potential candidates when seeking employment."
Noel Kelly, Graduate, BEng Civil Engineering (Hons), 2016.