The promise of open digital badges extends beyond their potential to recognize informal learning and professional development. Open badges also provide data that can be mined and analyzed to benefit learners, educators, and learning organizations, both locally and globally across the ecosystem. What does the current universe of badges look like? What practical data can be conveyed through badges? How can usable data be extracted from digital badges that can be used by learners and institutions of learning?

In this session you will be introduced to the Open Badges Infrastructure. You will see examples of badge system designs that use learner analytics and explore the potential for ecology-wide data analysis using a badge discovery platform under development. You will learn the benefits of badge data analysis for learners, educators, learning institutions, and researchers, and learn some of the current challenges in data collection, including pitfalls for badge system designers.

In this session, you will learn:

• Basics of open digital badges
• What kind of additional information can be associated with an open badge
• How badge metadata can help drive discovery and accessibility
• How to harness metadata for practical usage

Audience:
Intermediate and advanced designers, developers, project managers, managers, and directors.

Technology discussed in this session:
Open Badges Infrastructure, application-programming interface, web services, IOS applications, and learner analytics.