I’ve been talking about digital badges with different people in the last couple of weeks. Some of them didn’t know what I meant (others did). At most, they guessed I was talking about traditional certificates in pdf format.
So I ended answering the same question again and again: What’s the difference between digital credentials and digital badges?
Last Saturday I listened to an episode of Leading Learning titled Diving into digital credentials with Jonathan Finkelstein. Jonathan is the founder of Credly and was interviewed by Celisa Steele.
She addressed the same exact question to him: What’s the difference between digital credentials and digital badges? His answer was something similar to this:
As simple as that. A digital credential is something not self-reported used to certify (a pdf version of a traditional certificate, a LinkedIn review, etc.), while a digital badge is one type of digital credential.
Despite being only one type of credential, digital badges are powerful and I’m sure will be very popular in the coming years. Look at the following one:
Easy to put anywhere, very visual, but… it’s only an image, right? Now click on it, please…
Do you see it? Every digital badge has to have this kind of attached information to be valid. This is where it’s shown what the badge means, who the issuer is, why has it been issued, if it expires, etc.
So a badge has two different parts:
In summary, what proves the previous image?
This is only the beginning, but there is a lot more to talk about digital credentials and badges. Stay tuned!
Picture: Badges (Ellen Munro).
