Parchment Digital Badges

What are Open Badges?

Open Badges represent an opportunity for students and staff to securely organise and share their verified learning, achievements, and experiences throughout their time at the University of Stirling. They serve as a digital representation of these gained alongside and beyond formal University credit and allow earners to differentiate themselves from others, whilst demonstrating their commitment to continuous learning. Open Badges can be earnt and collected from multiple providers. Once earned, they can be shared across platforms including social media and employability websites, CVs and portfolios.

Elements of a badge

A digital badge is made up of the following five elements:

• A visual badge 
• Earner metadata (information) 
• University metadata 
• Metadata for the criteria for earning the badge
• Metadata for key dates, i.e. issue date and any expiry date

Benefits of earning a badge

An Open Badge allows you to visually display your skills and achievements beyond your coursework. It contains verifiable data and can be used across various platforms like your CV, portfolio, website, and social media.

Open digital badges offer several benefits including:

• They provide an easy, visual way to share validated skills and achievements with potential employers, clients, or higher education programs.
• You have the flexibility to manage and post your badge across different formats and platforms, such as LinkedIn.
• You can earn a single badge or multiple badges, creating themed collections by combining them.
• A University of Stirling digital badge signifies that your skills and achievements have been verified by the institution.

Note you can select the following image to view a larger version.

Further information

There are two different types of badges that can be used: Standalone badges and Pathways.

• Standalone badges are digital badges that exist independently and are not connected to other badges by levels or relevance.
• A pathway is a series of digital badges connected to each other by levels or relevance and are set by the issuer.

Pathways are a way for learners to visualise their learning path and stay motivated. They break down learning into manageable steps and empower learners to make decisions that shape their journey by offering both required and optional badges. Additionally, pathways help track progress, automatically award milestone badges and provide transparency to the learners allowing them to plan ahead and prepare for reaching future milestones in their learning journey.

The Learner Record

The Learner Record shows the learner’s badges and highlights their skills and achievements. It allows learners to easily view, track and share their Pathway progress by gathering all of the information on a single page. Learners can access their Learner Record by navigating to the ‘My record‘ menu in their Parchment Digital Badges space. On this page, learners can see:

• a dashboard with their subscribed pathways
• completed and in-progress pathways
• recently awarded badges
• information about sharing earned badges.

How to request a new badge or pathway

Complete the New Open Digital Badge form to request a new digital badge (login required).

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