Do you want to start issuing edubadges to students within your mbo, hbo or woinstitution? The first step is to connect your institution to the edubadges platform. Then you can start using edubadges. Steps 2 to 5 explain how to use edubadges for a specific course, or within a faculty, department or your entire institution.
Step 2: define your edubadge types
First, decide which edubadges you want to award within your institution. You can use edubadges for a variety of purposes, such as making education more flexible, promoting progression or improving the employment status of learners.
There are three different types of edubadges:
- Edubadge for regular education: a digital certificate of a recognised programme.
- Microcredential: a digital certificate of a short unit of study (such as a minor or module) with a nationally or internationally recognised quality framework describing the level and learning outcomes of the unit of study.
- Certificate for extra-curricular activities: a digital certificate for activities or courses outside the regular curriculum, to which no ECTS credits or formal credit are awarded.
Within the edubadges platform, you can issue all the above types. You can also start with one type of edubadge and add other types at a later stage.
Please note that it may be desirable to have different GDPR bases for each type of edubadge and therefore different privacy texts should be available in the platform. This is coordinated with the responsible FG and/or privacy and security officer of the institution and the edubadges service when the edubadges platform is first used.
Success factor: provide an edubadge with clear added value for the learner!
A prerequisite for a successful digital certificate is that the target group sees a clear added value in using it and thus finds it important to receive a digital certificate. When developing it, keep the following questions in mind: 'how does this edubadge fit into the learner's learning experience as a whole?' and 'what place does this certificate have in education and what can the learner do with it?'.
- for a particular target group, e.g. international students,
- in a 'plus programme', e.g. excellence education,
- to make a learning path clear within a regular programme, e.g. by defining basic and advanced badges that follow one another,
- in a particular subject area, for example the Information Skills subject,
- in a particular extracurricular pathway, e.g. student council membership,
- for achieving a certain entry-level, e.g. to operate certain equipment,
- in an institution-wide framework, e.g. 21st Century Skills,
- for staff, e.g. in the professionalisation programme,
- a certificate for professionals awarded within the framework of the Npuls higher education pilot 'Building on Microcredentials' and or the Npuls mbo pilot 'microcredentials'; the nationally agreed quality framework applies to these digital certificates.
More information on applications can be found in theLessons Learned from the edubadges pilot and the Lessons Learned from HO pilot microcredentialing.