Using digital badges for compliance with common standards

Many sectors and organisations follow specific standards and best practices to support operational excellence, compliance or demonstrate ethical responsibility; however, many of these may lack formal certifications. Badges provide a flexible, credible way to recognise and evidence a learner’s understanding and application of such standards.

Woman checking her micro-credentials on a mobile phone

1. Introduction 2. Use cases 3. Top tip 4. Exemplar badge 5. Download 6. Customise 7. Platform choice

Use cases

Issuing badges that align with such standards or best practices include:

Data privacy and GDPR awareness
Environmental awareness
Safeguarding children and vulnerable adults
Responsible use of AI

Top tip

Reference the specific recognised frameworks or guidelines to ensure the badge has credibility. Consider what evidence could be required that demonstrate the learner meets the standard.

Exemplar badge

Protecting Commercial Data

Description
Earners of this badge have demonstrated the knowledge and practical skills required to protect personal and organisational privacy in digital environments. Earners understand and apply methods to safeguard devices, data, and online identities.

Criteria

Earner has demonstrated their awareness and correct use of device and data protection methods including 2FA to secure accounts, encryption of hard drives, using a VPN to access remote network and using password managers to store and generate secure credentials.
Earner has demonstrated knowledge of backing up data both locally and using the cloud and evidenced their own backup process for work-related data.
Earner has demonstrated their awareness of cybersecurity threats including identifying and mitigating risks posed by ransomware, viruses and identity theft.
Earner has demonstrated the commercial implications of poor privacy practices in a work environment including reputational damage, financial penalties and data breaches.

Tags

Alignment
Being Safe and Responsible Online Level 1 – National Standards for Essential Digital Skills | UK Department for Education
The essential digital skills framework defines the digital skills adults need to safely benefit from, participate in and contribute to the digital world.

This is an example of using badges to demonstrate compliance with best practices required in the workplace.

This format could be adapted to demonstrate competence in various areas that are important for working lives, for example working with vulnerable adults, health and safety and responsible use of AI.

Download and customise this badge

Want to use this badge? Click the link for an Excel spreadsheet containing all of the badge data, ready to be copied and customised.

Download badge template file (.xls)

To use an exemplar badge and make it your own:

Download the spreadsheet and customise to your needs.
On your digital badge issuing platform of choice, create a new badge and input the badge data from the spreadsheet.
Edit and adapt the data to suit your needs.
Publish the badge / make it available for issuing.

Adapting an exemplar badge

While all badges that follow the Open Badge Standard will contain the same core components, different issuing platforms can label and format them differently and often have different approaches to applying settings and attributes to a badge.

Don’t panic – the excel file contains all the information you’ll need to build the badge on your chosen issuing platform (full list of Open Badge platforms) and come readily formatted with instructions for three popular issuing platforms: Open Badge Factory, Navigatr, and Credly.

Consider these badges as templates – it is always recommended to ensure your badges are adapted to your needs and tailored to be relevant to your recipients. This will ensure that your badge is meaningful and valued by those you issue it to.

Examples of customising an exemplar badge to fit your needs could include:

Expanding on the information to add specific detail about an activity you will issue the badge for.
Adjusting language to suit your organisation’s brand.
Adding a location.
Removing any elements you feel are not relevant to your badge recipients.

Platform choice

The platform examples provided in our exemplar badges are intended to help illustrate how a set of badge data may require adjusting to fit the issuing platform being used. Which badging platform you choose will depend on the on your individual use case and the functionality you require. The Digital Badging Commission does not endorse any particular badging platform. A full list of Open Badge platforms is maintained by 1EdTech.

If you represent an Open Badge platform and would like to be included in our exemplar files, please provide us with an excel sheet containing our exemplar data mapped to your system and we will add you to the download files.