The Rise of Digital Badges: How Decentralising Trust Could Change Everything
The transformation of skills recognition continues to gather pace. Traditional paper-based certification is being replaced by digital badges that recognise new forms of learning and better suit the needs of today’s business landscape. By 2023, more than half a million digital badges were created worldwide without any design standards, while more than 300 million badges were issued to individual learners. With more than 26,000 organisations designing digital badges and no common framework, designs or standards in place – employers are faced with an increasingly confusing picture. How can the industry work together to address this? What are the key issues holding back the rise of digital badges?
In the first of two articles, Tim Riches from Navigatr draws from 13 years of digital badging experience to answer these questions and adds yet another voice calling for the adoption of open and accessible design frameworks. Tim outlines some shared principles that could be adopted for creating trust in digital badges, and presents industry initiatives that are encouraging trust. Most importantly, he explains why our relationship with trust must change if the industry is to capitalise on the wealth of opportunities created by digital badges.
Our Reliance upon Trust in the Digital Age
We cannot have a meaningful conversation about a shared framework for digital credentials without first talking about trust. It is by some distance the major issue preventing our industry from realising its potential. Taking a step even further back, I think it is fascinating to consider how our relationship with trust is evolving in the digital age.
Institutional trust was something that was traditionally safeguarded by bricks-and-mortar institutions, but is now being redistributed across digital networks in ways that would have been unthinkable a few decades ago. This shift is not only technological, but also cultural, social and economic. For example, through services like Airbnb we’ve become comfortable with ideas like letting complete strangers into our houses. With the rise of digital credentials, our relationship with trust is changing and being brought into ever sharper focus.
The Shift from Institutional to Distributed Trust
Just like the new rental economy of Airbnb, we are seeing the same shift in our relationship with trust for digital credentials. The credentialing economy relies upon distributed trust using the same kinds of systems used by Airbnb to help us verify organisations and recognise learning that is digitally linked to individuals. This process is forcing us to rethink the roles that institutions and employers play in recognising skills and how we link them to opportunities for work.
Awarding institutions have been too slow to adapt to this shift, and the creation of new qualifications is nowhere near fast enough to meet the changing demands for skills. Consider an in-demand role such as a drone pilot or prompt engineer. These are yet to be listed in the UK’s official skills taxonomy, while courses for these roles are only delivered by a handful of forward thinking organisations.
With the introduction of digital credentials, we have a faster, more versatile and granular solution–one that enables individuals to demonstrate their skills and knowledge whenever and wherever they are gained. They democratise recognition and support lifelong learning, but like any transformation they bring significant challenges, most notably maintaining consistency and trust in this new emerging ecosystem.
The Digital Badge Explosion: Opportunity or Fad?
If you’ve seen people sharing badges on LinkedIn, you’re in good company because by 2023 the total global issuance of digital badges had reached 74 million. If we take into account issuing numbers of around 100 million from both Credly and Accredible, that figure will likely rise to more than 300 million today.
Some digital badges signify a high stake qualification, like those from City & Guilds who have issued 500,000 digital badges. The Open University has awarded more than 250,000 badges as pathways to their degrees. Other digital badges have been issued by cities and community groups who are building structured learning pathways from informal learning to employment.
From an employer viewpoint, businesses are issuing badges because they are seeing tangible benefits. At IBM, badges increased engagement by 87%, increased course enrollments by 129% and increased brand recognition through social media sharing at a value of between $50–200k per 10,000 badges shared. Research from the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) shows that 68% of company CEOs and recruitment managers want to see the digital credentials of candidates, so they can assess skills beyond traditional academic achievements such as degrees, and more easily differentiate between candidates.
Challenging the Norm with Decentralised Trust
If we take a moment to rewind back to the very beginning of digital badges, many of the reasons for how we got to where we are now can be found in their open-source origins. After digital badges were introduced by the Mozilla Firefox Foundation, they were purposefully decentralised, permitting anyone to create and distribute them, leading to their organic growth. This democratic method was groundbreaking and provided consistent technology for building and sharing badges across platforms. Importantly, it also meant there were no safeguards to uphold the consistent writing and design of digital badges. This part of the digital badge story is all too easily forgotten, but is now very much front and centre as we’re faced with untangling these roots in order for the industry to move forward.
Since the emergence of digital badges, their gradual adoption has forced a major shift in mindset for the industry. In many ways, it resembles how Airbnb disrupted the hospitality industry. By creating trust between peers, digital credentials are decentralising skills recognition. This encapsulates the major challenge for our industry and is a barrier holding it back. It’s tempting to see this shift as a before-and-after moment, but in reality it feels more like a slow-burn revolution that is unfolding before our eyes.
If we look at the wider landscape, education institutions have long held a monopoly on the validation of skills, but digital credentials are now issued by a much wider range of colleges, online learning platforms, workplaces and community groups. With decentralisation comes new risks. If anyone can issue a badge, how can meaningful credentials be distinguished from token recognition? The answer lies in shared frameworks and new forms of quality assurance that bring consistency and credibility to the system–frameworks that build trust at every level from learners to employers.
Ways we can Build Trust into Digital Badges
It is no accident that the trust established by online services such as Airbnb is often referred to as reputation systems. This level of trust results from systematic processes involving extensive verifications, reviews and background checks. For the purposes of digital badge verification, many of these can be borrowed to form the following principles. I invite educators and employers to apply these five principles for building trust in digital badges.
- Transparent metadata: A badge should very clearly state the skills it represents, the criteria for receiving it and who has issued it. It’s like a CV for the digital world, where proof is baked in.
- Verified issuers: Given that any organisation can issue a badge, verification of the issuer is essential. In the same way that Airbnb verifies hosts, badge issuers need to be verified to increase trust, whether they are national institutions, employers, colleges or online learning platforms.
- Consistent skills language: Badges must include a consistent and up-to-date description to be meaningful. These should include job-specific technical skills, certificates and essential cross-cutting or “durable” skills, using language that employers understand.
- Visual design framework: Badges should be easy to understand at a glance. A simple design framework can organise badges by learning types such as “informal” or “degrees”, and depth of knowledge such as “explore” or “apply” to make skills automatically identifiable.
- Third-Party endorsements: Similar to references on a CV, endorsers from reputable organisations lend credibility to a badge.
A Strong Ecosystem of Trust is Within Reach
As we go about our lives using services such as Airbnb and Uber, we barely give a thought to the seamless systems for trust upon which they operate. The digital badge industry is still evolving, but everything it needs to achieve the same level of trust and credibility for its own ecosystem is within reach. What we need to get there is a collaborative mindset and a willingness to make more of the small leaps that got us to where we are today. Foundations are being laid and the landscape is slowly shifting. In the UK, the Digital Badge Commission predicts a shift from paper certificates to digital credentials and is urging the adoption of open learning frameworks to benefit both learners and businesses. In more practical terms, this means providing transparent metadata and using a clear, shared visual framework for badge designs.
With this in mind, my next article will discuss the other key challenge facing the digital badge industry: visual design—and ensuring its consistency across frameworks. The article will present the latest efforts to improve metadata transparency by major players like the TrustEd Credential Coalition and produced with Google, Siemens, and Oracle–as well as universities and colleges. I will also present agencies who are all striving to establish a strong ecosystem of trust for digital badges, such as, Don Presant’s Learning Agents Adaptable Badge Taxonomy, RSA’s Badge Framework The Navigatr Badge Framework. And finally, the article will also demonstrate the role that quality assurance can play in boosting trust.
By Tim Riches, Founding Director, Navigatr
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