Using digital badges in South Africa informing the validation of a multi-channel open badge system at a German university

Abstract

Digital badging has become popular to accredit individuals for a gained competence or developing skills. Simultaneously, badges are meant to provide an incentive and benefit for an individual. In Germany, the use of a unified digital badging strategy, remains an area to explore. One of the most crucial points of concern currently with digital badging is how to validate or credit a competence or skillset and what value this validation will carry for the individual. The Mozilla digital badge backpack (Mozilla, 2013) is the badging system which was adapted to reward teachers in the ICT4RED initiative in South Africa for providing proof of applying the TPD training in the classrooms. Based on the experience from this project where researchers from Germany were also involved, it was decided to apply a similar badging system both digitally in addition to a paper-based model, to validate competencies gained during an online Master’s Degree program in Risk Management from the University of Koblenz-Landau in Germany. From the ICT4RED project it was found that validation and acknowledgement was the biggest challenge in the development of an open badge system. The purpose of this paper is to describe how the University of Koblenz-Landau addresses validation in their planned design of a multi-channel open badge system (OBS) to recognize and validate competence-learning.