Discendum Oy is developing the Open Badge Factory, a cloud-based management system for organizations to issue and manage open badges across platforms. The Open Badge Factory will allow organizations to authenticate badge creators and issuers, manage user rights and badge data in one place. It will include tools for badge creation and issuance, tracking of badges, and community sharing of badges. The project is scheduled to launch in January 2014 and be piloted by several educational institutions. The Open Badge Factory aims to help organizations strategically issue credentials as open badges while maintaining oversight and reputation.

1. Open Badge Factory
Issue Your Open Badges Anywhere,
Manage Them in One Place
Eric Rousselle
Discendum Oy

2. Discendum Oy
• Finnish eLearning service provider
• Our clients: educational, vocational establishments and
companies
• Our services:
– Optima and Totara LMS
– Kyvyt.fi ePortfolio
• Mahara and Totara partner
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3. What is Open Badge Factory?
• A cloud-based management system for Open Badge creators
and issuers developed by Discendum
• A development project, the outcome will be the Open Badge
Factory service
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4. Open Badges Concept in a Nutshell
• Developed by the Mozilla Foundation
• ”A digital badge is an online representation of a skill you’ve
earned. ” (Source: openbadges.org)
• Granular, user centered, portable
• New online standard to recognize and verify learning (Open
Badges Infrastructure)
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5. Roles and Architecture of the Open
Badges Concept
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Source: http://www.openbadges.org/en-US/about.html#how-it-works
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6. Discendum and Open Badges
• Discendum has been active in furthering the implementation
on the Open Badges concept in Finland because it promotes
the use of portfolios
• Kyvyt.fi ePortfolio’s Open Badges displayer released in
November 2012
• Optima’s Open Badges creator and issuer tools released in
January 2013
• About 100 badges have been issued using Optima
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7. What did we learn?
• Many organizations understand the potential of the Open
Badges concept but also the risk of a negative impact on their
brand and reputation
• Creating and issuing Open Badges require a strategy that
should be defined and handled at the organization’s
management level
• If badges are created and hosted on learning platforms or
other systems, management of badges becomes fragmented
• It should be possible to issue badges from several
systems, but organizations need to manage their badges in
one place
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8. The Open Badge Factory’s architecture
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9. The Open Badge Factory Features
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10. Main Features
• Member organization authentication / certification of badges
• Users’ rights management
• Badge creator tools
• Issuer tools
• Tracking system of issued badges
• OBF Member community (sharing and endorsement of
badges)
• Badge earners’s feedback system
• OBF clients for Moodle, Mahara and Optima
• Our own Open Badge backpack which is compatible with
other backpacks
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11. The OBF Project Schedules
• Starts officially on 1.8.2013
• Release of the first version 15.1.2014
• Piloting period from January to June 2014
• Release of the final version December 2014
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12. Project Partners and Founder
• Discendum (development and coordination)
• The Teacher Training School of Turku University (piloting)
• Kokkola University Consortium Chydenius (research and
consulting)
• OK Study Center (piloting)
• IlonaIT Oy (piloting)
• Raisoft Oy (piloting)
• Learning Agents Inc. (adviser)
• Mozilla Foundation (adviser)
• The Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation
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13. Information and Contacts
Openbadgefactory.com
eric.rousselle@discendum.com
heli.karjalainen@discendum.com
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