Degree certificates are highly sought after and can be an extremely valuable step in a career journey but are often inadequate at communicating the holistic value of a student’s time at university.

Along with the academic rigor of gaining a degree, university is an opportunity to gain real-world experience, both through practical degree modules and additional experiences in student life. Badging in HE can be used to reflect both curricula and co-curricular activities while arming students with the reference and language to give potential employers a detailed understanding of the value of their programme of study.

Issuing badges for curricular and co-curricular elements of student life is a great way to document and reward transferable skills, attitudes and values demonstrated in activities such as:

• Consultancy projects
• Industry placements and internships
• Student leadership and campaigning
• Societies
• Volunteering

Due to the specific nature of degree programmes and their relevance to particular sectors and industries, it is vital to write badges that will support a student in their next steps. Consider essential knowledge, skills, and attitudes required to succeed in career paths associated with the degree programme or activity at hand.

This badge works as an example of a specific activity in which the recipient has given their time to a cause and demonstrated desirable skills. In an HE setting, badges like this double as a professional reference and evidence that the recipient has applied skills in a practical setting relevant to their chosen industry. Its alignment at the Mastery stage, demonstrates that the skills demonstrated represent a high level of professional competence.

This format could be adapted to cover a wide range of activities such as those listed above, and becomes a beneficial way for universities to track experience and progression for students outside of the classroom.

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

To use an exemplar badge and make it your own:

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

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.

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.