Open badges: Challenges and opportunities

Abstract

The paper looks at the increasingly popular concept of Open Badges (OBs) and the technology that supports it, and provides several insights that might help researchers and practitioners decide on how to make the best use of OBs in specific educational settings. In spite of the current big hype around OBs among practitioners, academic literature on them is still scarce. There is a number of challenges that developers and the wider educational community face when it comes to developing and enacting an OB system - from pedagogical and motivational ones, to technological, to those related to institutional policies and to validity and credibility of badges. By discussing these challenges, the paper offers a critical overview and a reality check of practical opportunities for using OBs, thus indicating several avenues to inspire further research. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.