2026 Badge Summit

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.

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.

Maricopa County Community Colleges, ASU, and DXtera share a living use case of issuing verifiable credentials at scale through the Trusted Learner Network. This session highlights how real students are gaining access to secure, portable records of their learning, while institutions build shared infrastructure that supports transparency, transfer, and lifelong learning—and invites others to join a growing credentialing network.

In an educational landscape where 75% of learners are more likely to enroll in institutions that offer microcredentials, scaling a badge program is no longer optional, it is an institutional imperative. However, issuing the credential is only half the equation. Many institutions struggle to track what happens after a badge is awarded, leaving them with limited visibility into learner engagement, sharing behaviors, and the overall efficacy of their programs.

This session introduces a data-driven paradigm shift utilizing the new analytics capabilities within Parchment Digital Badges (PDB). We will explore how robust, actionable dashboards empower program leaders to measure the true, end-to-end impact of their micro-credentialing initiatives. By shifting the focus from simple issuance metrics to holistic learner outcomes, institutions can now track how students interact with skill-tagged credentials, monitor share rates across professional networks like LinkedIn, and understand exactly which badges are successfully capturing employer attention.
Join us to discover how leveraging labor market insights, skills recommendations, and deep analytics can transform your credentialing strategy. We will demonstrate how these insights allow you to identify high-performing pathways, continuously optimize program design, and definitively prove the ROI and labor-market value of your skills-based learning initiatives to stakeholders and students alike.

Badges are everywhere but not all badges are created equal. In this highly interactive session, participants will critique real-world badges (the good, the bad, and the ugly), unpack what makes badges visible, meaningful, and trusted, and then design their own. You will draft badge metadata, evidence, and messaging, and leave with a template you can use in you own work.

The Challenge: Colonial credentialing systems universally recognize Western validation mechanisms while frequently framing millennia-old Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) as “unrecognized” or “informal.” This perpetuates a fundamental injustice: the refusal to recognize Indigenous Recognition Systems (IRS) themselves—the sophisticated, community-governed protocols for validating competence and conferring legitimacy that predate and function independently of formal institutions.

The Solution: Recognition Sovereignty: This session introduces the Indigenous Recognition Systems (IRS) framework as a decolonial model for justice. It argues for a paradigm shift: from seeking recognition for Indigenous knowledge (e.g., through Recognition of Prior Learning, RPL) to demanding recognition of indigenous practices shaping economic sectors (e. g. Traditional Health Practicioners) to interfacing with legacy Qualificaiton Frameworks

Format:
Conversation triggered by the above prompt.  Insights and reflections will be leverage to inform policy reforms on IKS in other regions (Africa, Asia) where IKS is also a topic of debate. 

Bonus Track:
A booklet about "Protocols for non-indigenous people working with indigenous knowledge" will be shared with all participants.

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.

This collaborative session shares lessons learned from Yavapai College’s first year of microcredential development. We’ll discuss what worked, what didn’t, and what we wish we’d known, including processes, quality criteria, faculty and student support, and alignment to the workforce. Participants at any stage will be invited to share their lessons learned and learn from one another.

As Learning and Employment Records (LERs) gain traction, two “last-mile” questions continue to shape whether credentials can move from concept to real-world impact: what information employers actually need to make decisions, and how credentials are transferred between systems in practice.
In this session, 1EdTech will share early findings from ongoing research exploring these two foundational areas. Drawing on employer research, ecosystem surveys, and technical analysis, we will summarize:

• What employers say they need to see in credentials to support skills-based hiring and talent decisions (e.g., skills clarity, validation signals, evidence, and context).
• How credentials are currently transported across issuers, wallets, repositories, and employer systems—and where gaps, inconsistencies, or alignment appear.

Designed for a general Digital Credentials Summit audience, this session is informational rather than prescriptive. It offers a clear snapshot of emerging insights to help educators, credential issuers, platform providers, employers, and policymakers better understand the current state of LER adoption—and what may need to evolve next.
Attendees will leave with a shared baseline understanding of the evidence shaping LER discussions heading into deeper technical and employer-focused conversations.

This presentation explores the growing demand for trusted, high‑quality, and verifiable credentials by examining the importance of transparency in credentialing processes, highlighting strategies for effectively engaging stakeholders in credential development, and demonstrating how strong credentials enhance both student career success and employer trust.