Mozilla officially released Open Badges 1.0 - an open standard for online training certificates

The idea behind Open Badges is as simple as it’s large-scale — to combine any training programs, courses, and lessons available on the Internet using the open standard icons that are given to participants at the end of the course. In other words, Open Badges are standard mini-diplomas that can be placed in your social network profiles and professional communities, on a personal website or on a resume.

Any organization can issue badges; the significance and “steepness” of each badge is determined only by the authority of the one who issued it. It can be a small company, and a huge university. Now the list of participants already 600 organizations, including the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, the Department of Education of New York, University of Illinois. Microsoft, NASA, Pixar and others have already announced their plans to join the Open Badges infrastructure.
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Higher education today costs a lot of money, and if online courses, which are often taught by teachers at the best universities, can give students knowledge comparable to those that students at their universities, then universities do not hurry to give diplomas and certificates. Many people believe that the traditional closed and conservative higher education system needs a " jailbreak ". Open Bages may be necessary for this to be the basis of a global system of accessible, independent education and proof of knowledge.




Technically, each icon is a JSON data structure containing a hash of the recipient’s postal address, information about the name of the icon that issued the organization, links to its image and a detailed description of the criteria for issuing the icon. The icon can be revoked if it was issued by mistake, or obtained dishonestly. Here is an example of such a structure:

{ "name": "Awesome Robotics Badge", "description": "For doing awesome things with robots that people think is pretty great.", "image": "https://example.org/robotics-badge.png", "criteria": "https://example.org/robotics-badge.html", "tags": ["robots", "awesome"], "issuer": "https://example.org/organization.json", "alignment": [ { "name": "CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RST.11-12.3", "url": "http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/RST/11-12/3", "description": "Follow precisely a complex multistep procedure when carrying out experiments, taking measurements, or performing technical tasks; analyze the specific results based on explanations in the text." }, { "name": "CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RST.11-12.9", "url": "http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/RST/11-12/9", "description": " Synthesize information from a range of sources (eg, texts, experiments, simulations) into a coherent understanding of a process, phenomenon, or concept, resolving conflicting information when possible." } ] } 

To verify the authenticity of the badge, there are two mechanisms - unique URLs and a digital signature, but so far only the first works. Specifications, a detailed description of the process of issuing and confirming icons and all the necessary tools and sources are published on Gitkhab .

Source - blog Mozilla Open Bages .