Introducing Badges in Portflow: Showcase Your Achievements

In today’s world of modernizing education and flexible pathways, achievements and credentials come in many forms. Badges are a powerful tool to recognize the accomplishments along a learner’s personal learning journey. That’s why we are thrilled to introduce a new feature in Portflow – the ability to add badges. Whether your badges were issued through platforms like Accredible, Credly, Canvas Credentials, Milestones, or EduBadges, you can now seamlessly incorporate these verified credentials into your portfolio.

What Are Badges?

Badges are digital emblems that can be awarded for a particular accomplishment. As such, badges form a flexible, granular, and modular way to acknowledge skills and (academic) achievements. In a context of increased flexibility, educational institutions use badges to facilitate verifiable recognition of skills & competencies acquired with the completion of smaller-scale units of education. They are being used to complement, signal the corresponding “building blocks”, or even replace full programme diplomas & certificates.

Verified Evidence of Achievements

Learners can now incorporate their awarded badges into their portfolio alongside other evidence of learning experiences like artefacts, projects, and reflections. Badges can also be verified within Portflow to ensure their authenticity, providing users and viewers with confidence in the credibility of the achievements.

Why Would You Want Badges in Your Portfolio?

Badges are a growing part of the digital credentialing landscape, and their inclusion in Portflow offers several key benefits:

• Validation of Skills: By integrating badges into your portfolio, you provide concrete, verifiable evidence of your skills and accomplishments. With badge validation, teachers, coaches, peers, and employers can easily confirm the authenticity of your credentials.
• Visual Recognition: Badges offer a visual way to recognize and display your achievements. They stand out, adding both credibility and a professional touch to your portfolio.
• Simplified Credential Management: Instead of juggling multiple platforms or systems, Portflow brings your credentials together in one place. You can now manage and showcase your badges and portfolio in a unified, organized way.

Incorporating badges into your Portflow portfolio provides a streamlined way to showcase your skills and accomplishments, while ensuring transparency and trust in the credentials you present.

Adding Badges to Portflow

Portflow supports the inclusion of badges that are hosted on well-known platforms that are based on the Open Badges standard, including Accredible, Credly, Canvas Credentials (formerly Badgr), Anthology Milestone or EduBadges. Learners can add a badge just like any other type of evidence to their collections. When importing a badge, they can enter the email address that was used to issue the badge to, allowing them to publicly verify the authenticity of their badge. It can subsequently be linked to any other collections or goals within their portfolio. Awarded badges from the LMS (e.g. upon course completion) can also be added to the portfolio by the student.

Badges can also be showcased on the learner’s portfolio homepage for extra visibility. Learners can put their personal profiles and unique skills in the limelight by selecting the badges they are most proud of right next to their profile picture in their portfolio header. In addition, a backpack that includes all the learner’s badges across the collections can be used as a full overview of all received badges.