As the ECVET system, the European Credit system for Vocational and Education Training, is a long process and requires structural involvement at country and professional branch levels to be fully beneficial to the users. The Trust-Me partners decided to deploy the Open Badges approach supported by the Mozilla Foundation. This Open Badges approach is not implemented instead of the ECVET objective of the Trust-Me project, but very well in complement and the preparation of it.
Open Badges allows the Trust-Me partners:
- to validate every single learning brick of an involved and participating stakeholder (contributing and beneficiary ones).
- to define learning objectives, learning paths and job/role profiles.
- to integrate with other existing learning or collaborative experience present on the market or in professional branches
- to monitor activities and involvement and to empower users and contributors.
- to contribute to the trust building phase between the various stakeholders of the ECVET processes (and reinforce and speed up the Memorandum of Understanding phase as well the design phase of the corresponding ECVET objectives to be developed). It actively and positively contributes to the convergence of ECVET process with the practical implementation and towards its application on soft skills and competences as well.
Therefore, the Trust-Me project implements:
- a validation system (creating and building evidence) with Open Badges on its platform (knowledge, skills, competences, participation, contribution, engagement, progresses...), including stock taking on informal and non-formal learning experience and outcomes.
- a learning path approach per main domain, that enables the user/beneficiary to take the various steps in the right order or being sure he/she has the relevant level (Prior Learning validation steps may be introduced to acknowledge each beneficiary's case).
- multiple series of badges which are compliant to the Open Badges Infrastructure
- a publication/generation of the badges of the users, so that they can integrate them into their portfolio and get them published as they want for their personal development, independently of the Trust-Me platform.
- a quality assurance system that includes a maintenance of the badges (some being valid for a certain duration, with the possibility to validate them over time) and will benefit from the support and recognition by professional bodies or stakeholders.
Example of an Open Badges series ... on Open Badges implemented by the Multi-Actors Cooperation OpenBadges platform ... on the Open Badges themselves. :-)
