Transparent Credentials: How Metadata Shares the Learner’s Journey

One cannot explore micro-credentials without understanding digital badges. Digital badges are electronic images containing embedded metadata to recognize, display, and share information about a learner’s skills and knowledge. Digital badges recognize the achievement of informal and formal learning experiences. They often represent a micro-credential; however, digital badges are not always connected to micro-credentials. At Digital Promise, micro-credentials are competency-based digital credentials that recognize a person’s competence in a specific skill or set of skills. Aside from being competency-based, these digital credentials are on-demand, personalized, and shareable. By leveraging badging technology, micro-credentials provide an opportunity for learners to reskill or upskill, keeping their skills relevant, valuable, and verified in a career, thus creating a professional learning currency. Digital Promise’s awarded micro-credentials are represented as digital badges that adhere to the 1EdTech Open Badges standards. Digital badges carry specific metadata that explains a learner’s learning experience to demonstrate skill competencies, such as issuer name, criteria, evidence, and issue date. The metadata “connects evidence and criteria” to provide “a wealth of information beyond what current educational credentials communicate” (Young, West, & Nylon, 2019, p. 106).

What is Metadata?

Metadata is the data that a digital badge carries that verifies the authenticity of the competence of a skill. It conveys what the learner has demonstrated they can do. Digital Promise’s micro-credentials are written to our competency-based education framework. We work with many different issuers, so there is a variance in the metadata. Metadata can include, but is not limited to:

• Issuer: Name and contact of the badge issuer
• Standards: Alignment to academic or professional standards
• Criteria: Tasks to achieve the badge
• Evidence: Artifacts or documentation supporting the competence of skill
• Skills Tags: Standardized keywords or taxonomies for searchability
• Issue Date: Date of when the badge was awarded to the learner
• Expiration Date (if any): Ensuring relevancy over time
• Earner: An individual who earned the badge while maintaining safeguards for personal data

If it is not already visible when viewing a digital badge, the metadata embedded can be viewed and verified by simply clicking on the badge. It can also be checked through the Open Badge Validator.

These details about the learning experience are essential for learners, employers, and learning institutions. For learners, metadata enhances the visibility and recognition of specific skills—without metadata, the badge is just an image. It makes it easier for learners to share and verify their skills in academic or professional settings. For employers, metadata helps narrow candidates during hiring, improving skills matching. It provides trusted evidence of employees’ achievements and qualifications. For the issuing organizations, metadata strengthens the adoption and credibility of their digital badges. It provides greater engagement between learners, learning institutions, and the workforce.

Capturing the Learner’s Journey

Metadata is not just data but rather a narrative of a learner’s learning experience regarding a specific skill. Metadata adds context and meaning to digital badges, enhancing credibility and ensuring transparency and trust between the issuers and learners. Open digital badges allow for the portability of the learning experience across different platforms. This approach to skill recognition is reshaping how learners access and demonstrate skills in their careers. It also increases access to postsecondary credentials for everyone because it broadens opportunities to gain recognition for skills regardless of when and where they were developed.

Digital Promise has been a pioneer in competency-based micro-credentials and has more than 10 years of experience in supporting organizations with their micro-credentialing needs. Check out this eBook, The Role of Micro-Credentials in Lifelong Learning and Development: Empowering Learners, Empowering Organizations, a comprehensive resource accessible to all interested in understanding micro-credentials. If you are interested in learning more about Digital Promise’s micro-credential services, please contact us at microcredentials@digitalpromise.org.