Unique Learning Badges is inspired by the developments of Mozilla Open Badges and driven by the need to better recognise the nonformal learning of young people. (Markovic & Paddison, 2014). It was developed through a European partnership of 7 organisations. The UNIQUE Learning Badges platform enables any organisation to design their unique recognition system and use Open Badges to reward learning and achievements. UNIQUE Learning Badges offers an online accreditation platform and various other tools to support the recognition process. As an organisation that issues badges you need to do the following, as described by Ragauskas & Kriauciunas (2013)
- Decide on the behaviours, skills or attitudes you want to promote.
- Think of some criteria for a badge that would begin to promote those behaviours, skills or attitudes.
- Consider if the criteria for the badge you’ve come up with can be broken down in more granular ways.
- If (as is likely) you end up with multiple badges, think about multiple (potentially interest-based) pathways through your badge ecosystem. Ask yourself, which badges depend upon other badges? What are the relationships between these badges?
- Get someone to design an awesome looking graphical badge for you or use the Open Badge Designer tool5 online to do it yourself and use a badgeissuing platform such as badg.us, ForAllBadges, WPBadger or BadgeOS to issue badges.
The individuals who are interested in getting a badge from their organization need to follow particular steps and processes that are described by each badging organization. Therefore, this tool cannot be explored from the learner’s perspective, yet it was worth to mention it.
