2026 Badge Summit

Digital credential initiatives often launch with strong intentions yet struggle to stay aligned as they scale. Structured as an investigative design challenge that borrows from The Traitors–style reveal mechanics, this Dream Maker’s Lounge session will invite participants to examine the “traitors” that quietly undermine pilots and programs, not people, but misaligned incentives, language drift, pacing pressures, and system constraints. Participants will engage in facilitated, small-group work using real digital credential initiatives to identify hidden assumptions, incentives, and influences, then collaboratively make what is shaping the work visible. How might we bring these dynamics into the open and rethink them so digital credential initiatives become coherent across practice, language, and systems? Participants will leave with clearer language for naming what’s actually getting in the way and a better sense of where small shifts could make existing initiatives easier to understand and sustain.

Building on Third Sector’s report, “The Future is Portable: Designing Equitable Credentialing Systems,” this session explores how non-degree credentials and digital wallets can center learner voice, giving individuals ownership of their skills and trajectory. Attendees representing states, institutions, and employers will learn how to create conditions that enable learners to access transparent, portable, and equitable pathways that reflect real learning, lived experience, and workforce readiness.

In LER creation, we focus so much on interoperability but in reality, there are not yet many use cases where it is necessary. Until we reach widespread adoption, demonstrating interoperability can feel forced - moving people between systems that they might not naturally move between. What will the first partnerships and ecosystems be that facilitate interoperability in a way that provides real value to users? How can we ensure that this experience seamless for users across the lifecycle?

For centuries, higher education has invested in learners enabling them to build economic, social and cultural capital through a variety of settings. How can institutions help students write and share their narratives with evidence that says, “This is what I practiced and how”? This session asks attendees to reimagine howlearner experiencescan be digitally transported and verified by using Competencies and Academic Standards Exchange (CASE), Comprehensive Learner Record (CLR) and Open Badges together.

Presented by Dr. Julie Keane (supported by Leigh Gillis)
This practitioner-led design inquiry session will guide attendees through a structured design-based exploration of two central questions: "How could contribution in your world become visible?" and "What might become possible if this were to occur?" Facilitators will engage participants in identifying invisible forms of contribution within their institutions and communities, introducing recognition as infrastructure rather than reward, and mapping system breakdowns in small groups. Participants will surface specific equity gaps, missing data, and barriers to mobility before prototyping "visible contribution pathways" tailored to their environments—such as programs, badges, platforms, or employer partnerships—with optional prompts from PathLedger™ to imagine how contributions could be classified and connected without requiring technical expertise. Presenters will provide an overview of CAWBL's structure and grassroots engagement tools, followed by group sharing of one transformative shift that visibility could enable (e.g., better advising, stronger employer matches, more equitable access). The session will close with collective reflection on infrastructure's role in converting lived experience into mobility and emerging U.S.–Canada collaboration opportunities, with attendees receiving the same resource card distributed at the Table Talk session.

Ready to turn skills-forward momentum into an integrated, repeatable program supported by a coherent digital credentials approach? This is a working session for education technology leaders and implementers who have started skills-forward efforts and want to scale them across the institution through durable processes, interoperable systems, and consistent credential practices. Participants will map their current state through a rapid exercise and then connect with peers to hear best practices for opportunities to scale.

We’ll translate common scale-breakers into concrete actions, connecting workflows across teams and platforms, strengthening credential consistency and quality, and making skills data mobile. You’ll walk away with new ideas to accelerate execution—high-energy, highly interactive, and focused on what you can implement next.

Purpose
This session is designed to surface the questions that matter most to participants about trust in digital credentialing -- and send those questions into the main conference where they can be explored across sessions over three days.

Rather than delivering content, we are creating the conditions for participants to shape their own learning agenda. The session has three parts: a shared foundation (framing) + an experiential activity (broken credential game) + reflection (generating questions to take into the conference).

Participants leave with:
- A shared vocabulary for talking about trust across layers of the credentialing ecosystem
- At least one question they generated themselves, grounded in their own work

Who This Is For
Anyone attending Badge Summit with an interest in trust, verification, transparency, or the infrastructure that makes credentials meaningful -- regardless of technical background. No prior knowledge of CTDL, machine-readable data, or credential standards is required.

Session Flow
1. Welcome and Trust Stack Framing (~15 minutes)

Jeanne and Deb open with a short, conversational introduction to the "trust stack" -- the layers of trust that make a credential meaningful:

- Issuer identity: is this a real, legitimate organization?
- Learner identity: did this specific person actually earn this?
- Credential description: is what it claims clear and meaningful?
- Skill alignment: are the competencies machine-readable and connected to shared frameworks?
- Verification: can anyone check this independently?
- Portability: does it travel across systems without losing its meaning?

This is not a lecture. The goal is to give everyone a shared vocabulary before the activity, not to explain how any of it works technically. The animating question for the session:

Where does trust actually break down -- and what would it take to fix it?

2. The Broken Credential Game (~20 minutes)
Everyone uses a set of printed credential cards -- fictional badges issued to fictional people from fictional issuers. The cards vary deliberately:

- Some are rich: machine-readable skill alignments, issuer verification, evidence links, competency descriptions
- Some are thin: a title and a description field, nothing more
- Some are broken: the issuer no longer exists, the skill alignment points to a dead URL, learner identity is unverifiable

The activity: Participants circulate and try to "hire" each other based only on what is on a credential card. No side conversations, no context -- just the card.

3. Reflection (~15 minutes): We come back together and ask one question:

What made you trust it -- or not?

The reflection is not about what the "right" answers are. It is a way for participants to name what they just experienced, in their own words, before they formulate questions to take into the conference.

Each participant writes down at least one question-- something the game surfaced for them that they want to explore with others. Prompts to offer if people get stuck:

- What broke in the game, and why did it matter?
- What is the hardest trust problem you face in your own work?
- What would you need to understand better to make credentials more trustworthy?

There are no wrong answers. This is not a test. The stickier and more specific the question, the better the follow-up discussion it will generate.

Connecting to the Conference
The questions generated in this session are meant to travel. Here are a few ways to make that happen:

Carry specific questions into the conference sessions and ask them out loud.

Many digital badges are built on the premise of closing equity gaps by recognizing skills and abilities that are typically overlooked. But badges can only be as effective in this mission as their design allows. This session poses the question: is it possible to eliminate human bias in designing digital badges? We invite participants to explore how well-intentioned credentials may unintentionally reproduce inequities of access, recognition, or privilege. Together, we’ll examine biases in design, technology, and power—and co-create principles for building truly equitable credentials.

Create your app. Credential your learners. Connect your community.

Join us for a hands-on session where participants will collectively build a working app in minutes using LearnCard and a new suite of AI-assisted open-source tools. We'll confront the real economics of "free" tools, the labor of maintenance, and how hyper-local recognition systems can contribute to global infrastructure. Bring laptops. Leave with both a functioning prototype and honest understanding of what sustainable public goods actually require.

Open source isn't free, it's freedom.

Recommended Setup:

• Download and setup LearnCard 
• Review LearnCard Docs
• Review Connecting Embedded Apps

How might we drive employer adoption of LERs and digital credentials to advance skills-based hiring? In this Dream Makers’ Lounge, cross-sector leaders will examine what works and fails across small, mid-sized, and Fortune 1000 employers and co-create a segment-specific roadmap that enables employer engagement and adoption. 

“Commons” models create efficiencies by allowing creators to share work that can be reused and adapted by others. Through a rapid design consultancy, participants will help explore how “Commons” models could benefit the microcredential landscape. We will then envision essential infrastructure elements that would support cross-institutional sharing and reuse, including metadata-rich tools or platforms to surface quality signals and workforce alignment.

The goal of this design challenge is to further the ongoing discussion regarding a potentially universal LER and credential survivability and longevity. Issuing bodies such as universities and private companies shutter each year, leaving learners without ongoing access to their digital credentials. No centralized LER exists for documentation and validation of such credentials. 


The Challenge Statement: How might we decouple the verification of a skill from the existence of its issuer, creating a digital credential that is as permanent, portable, and owned by the learner as a physical certificate/diploma, yet remains machine-readable and instantly verifiable by any employer globally?


Success Criteria for the Solution:

• Self-Sovereign: The learner must be able to hold the data file and share it without asking the issuer for permission or paying a fee.
• Issuer-Agnostic Verification: The mark of authenticity must survive even if the issuing body dissolves.
• Semantic Interoperability: An employer's system must not just see the file but understand what the skill means within a standards system
• Standard-Verified: A governing body or bodies issue standardization for credential value

Credentialing programs aim to signal durable skills, yet decision-making is often expected of learners without being explicitly named, taught, or recognized. In this Dream Makers’ Lounge session, participants will explore Decision Education as a practical framework for making judgment, reasoning, and decision-making more visible across badges, credentials, and learning pathways.

Through a real-world example, a workforce-skills exercise, and an interactive experience with the Confident? board game, attendees will identify where decision-making may already be embedded in their own programs. The game offers a hands-on example of how Decision Education can be taught and recognized through engaging learning experiences—not as an added burden, but as a practical layer within work already underway.

The session will also share emerging Alliance approaches for connecting standards, learning experiences, evidence, and recognition, helping participants identify one practical next step for making decision skills more visible in their own credential ecosystems.

Join a design sprint grounded in Education Design Lab’s Advancing Workforce Mobility RFP, where we’ll consider the question, “How might we design credentialing solutions that unlock mobility for STARs across systems?” Given real constraints, you’ll generate, stress-test, and refine concepts, translating them into useful design criteria and building blocks for further development. We’ll end with a sneak peek at the ideas emerging from the RFP cohort.

Purpose
This session is designed to surface the questions that matter most to participants about trust in digital credentialing -- and send those questions into the main conference where they can be explored across sessions over three days.

Rather than delivering content, we are creating the conditions for participants to shape their own learning agenda. The session has three parts: a shared foundation (framing) + an experiential activity (broken credential game) + reflection (generating questions to take into the conference).

Participants leave with:
- A shared vocabulary for talking about trust across layers of the credentialing ecosystem
- At least one question they generated themselves, grounded in their own work

Who This Is For
Anyone attending Badge Summit with an interest in trust, verification, transparency, or the infrastructure that makes credentials meaningful -- regardless of technical background. No prior knowledge of CTDL, machine-readable data, or credential standards is required.

Session Flow
1. Welcome and Trust Stack Framing (~15 minutes)

Jeanne and Deb open with a short, conversational introduction to the "trust stack" -- the layers of trust that make a credential meaningful:

- Issuer identity: is this a real, legitimate organization?
- Learner identity: did this specific person actually earn this?
- Credential description: is what it claims clear and meaningful?
- Skill alignment: are the competencies machine-readable and connected to shared frameworks?
- Verification: can anyone check this independently?
- Portability: does it travel across systems without losing its meaning?

This is not a lecture. The goal is to give everyone a shared vocabulary before the activity, not to explain how any of it works technically. The animating question for the session:

Where does trust actually break down -- and what would it take to fix it?

2. The Broken Credential Game (~20 minutes)
Everyone uses a set of printed credential cards -- fictional badges issued to fictional people from fictional issuers. The cards vary deliberately:

- Some are rich: machine-readable skill alignments, issuer verification, evidence links, competency descriptions
- Some are thin: a title and a description field, nothing more
- Some are broken: the issuer no longer exists, the skill alignment points to a dead URL, learner identity is unverifiable

The activity: Participants circulate and try to "hire" each other based only on what is on a credential card. No side conversations, no context -- just the card.

3. Reflection (~15 minutes): We come back together and ask one question:

What made you trust it -- or not?

The reflection is not about what the "right" answers are. It is a way for participants to name what they just experienced, in their own words, before they formulate questions to take into the conference.

Each participant writes down at least one question-- something the game surfaced for them that they want to explore with others. Prompts to offer if people get stuck:

- What broke in the game, and why did it matter?
- What is the hardest trust problem you face in your own work?
- What would you need to understand better to make credentials more trustworthy?

There are no wrong answers. This is not a test. The stickier and more specific the question, the better the follow-up discussion it will generate.

Connecting to the Conference
The questions generated in this session are meant to travel. Here are a few ways to make that happen:

Carry specific questions into the conference sessions and ask them out loud.

Badges are getting easier to issue, but harder to justify. In this interactive session, participants apply an outcomes framework co-designed by the EDL Skills Validation Network to a badging initiative they are already part of to shift from badging activity to badging impact. Attendees will refine their approach to demonstrate real change, credible evidence, and equitable impact for learners, employers and the ecosystem. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hkP5BghGVJgyaJ8Ei3ks-8sPy_jkLYdf3wLtKtbrZFk/edit?usp=sharing

In this 45-minute, hands-on design workshop, participants will collaboratively design, issue, and experience a digital badge from the institutional perspective. Guided by Tomás Mindlin (Founder & CEO, Proof of Knowledge) and Jim Vernon (Aims Community College), attendees will walk through the practical steps required to build a credible, employer-relevant digital credential.

Rather than focusing on technology alone, the workshop emphasizes credential credibility, institutional ownership, and learner trust. Participants will explore how fully white-label, standards-aligned digital credentials can be issued under an institution’s own brand and domain, reinforcing trust with learners and employers while maintaining interoperability through Open Badges 3.0.


By the end of the session, attendees will have created a complete badge prototype and gained a practical framework they can apply to credit programs, workforce and CTE initiatives, co-curricular learning, continuing education, or employee professional development—regardless of their institution’s technical maturity.

This interactive design challenge engages participants in hands-on badge design for civic participation. Using an adapted Badge Canvas, small groups prototype credentials for learners such as students, election workers, or community leaders. Participants define outcomes, evidence, and assessment approaches aligned with durable skills and experiential learning. The session models learning by actively engaging participants in the design process.

Many credentials, assessments, and LER projects claim to improve “mobility,” but what does that actually mean in practice? This interactive design challenge invites participants to test a simple “Mobility Ladder” framework across education, workforce, and credentialing contexts. Together, we’ll examine where projects truly create movement for learners and workers—and where assumptions break down—surfacing shared metrics, gaps, and new questions for the field.

Verifiable Learning and Work Records (LWRs) and digital credentials promise a new era of mobility, recognition, and self-sovereignty. They are being rapidly deployed across education, workforce, and government systems as tools to improve hiring equity, skills recognition, and lifelong learning. But behind this promise lies a growing and under-examined reality: these technologies can also harm the very people they aim to empower.

Based on the book When Credentials Cause Harm, this session explores the risks and inequities embedded in the design, deployment, and governance of digital credentialing systems. Drawing on real-world case studies, international frameworks, and original research, we will walk attendees through the unintended consequences of LWRs, including surveillance, misrepresentation, exclusion, platform dependency, and the erosion of consent.

The session invites attendees to work through a series of critical questions:
1. Who decides what constitutes a valid skill?
2. What frameworks shape credentialing systems, and who gets left out?
3. Why do so many platforms prioritize vendor opportunity and market incentives over human needs?
4. And most importantly, how do we design alternative models of trust and recognition that truly center equity, justice, and care?

Participants will engage with:

1. A breakdown of how credentialing infrastructure is funded, governed, and built
2. Case studies from refugee programs, reentry initiatives, and digital identity pilots
3. Insights into credential frameworks and their cultural blind spots
4. Examples of how nonprofits and public agencies are unintentionally complicit in harm
5. Design principles driven by consent, equity, and participatory governance
   
   

This workshop invites educators, technologists, policymakers, researchers, and community practitioners to shift from viewing digital credentials as neutral tools to understanding them as socio-technical systems with real human stakes. It calls for new frameworks of accountability and consent: not just technical interoperability, but social interoperability grounded in justice and care.

Rationale and Aims: While there is growing enthusiasm around digital credentials, few forums critically examine the risks they pose, especially for people from marginalized communities. This workshop fills that gap by unpacking the systemic design issues, funding incentives, and governance failures that too often go unaddressed. This workshop is especially timely as countries, agencies, and tech vendors scale verifiable LWR systems with minimal public understanding or oversight.

It is intended for audiences who care about technological innovations that serve the public good and are willing to ask: not just 'can we build it?' but 'should we, and for/with whom?'