Open Badges Then and Now
A Badge Summit Pre-Conference
Join us for a 15-year retrospective on Open Badges and a hands-on workshop exploring practical ways badges can be used today. This workshop invites the Badge Summit community to revisit the original promise of Open Badges, celebrate how far the movement has come, and experience what happens when badges become practical, portable, social, trusted, and useful in the real world.
In 2011, Mozilla helped launch Open Badges as a public-good and bold idea: learning should be recognized wherever it happens, owned by the learner, and portable across institutions, platforms, and communities. Fifteen years later, the question is no longer whether badges can work. The question is: What can badges become and enable now that the infrastructure is ready?
This hands-on pre-conference brings the Badge Summit community back to the roots of the movement while looking forward to its next chapter. Together with Mozilla, LEF and friends will lead an interactive exploration of how Open Badges have evolved from digital symbols of recognition into powerful, real-world tools for learning, identity, mobility, community, employment, and opportunity.
Rather than another panel about the future, this is an active workshop where participants will experience that future directly. Attendees will move through interactive badge stations, each demonstrating a different use case in action. At each station, participants complete a simple real-world activity, earn a standards-based badge, and claim it into
LearnCard or a compatible learner wallet of their choice.
By the end of the session, every participant will leave with a collection of badges that tells a bigger story: Badges are no longer just static proof that something happened.
They are portable evidence of who we are, what we can do, where we belong, and where we can go next.
