Скачать или смотреть ePIC 2022 - The IDB Credentials Framework: Expanding Open Recognition Beyond Micro-credentials

Stella Porto, Inter-American Development Bank, USA
Don Presant, Learning Agents, Canada
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The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) is a multilateral international development organization similar to the IMF and the World Bank. With a history dating back to 1959, it is considered the leading source of development financing for Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). Its aim is to support and enhance development in sustainable, equitable, and climate-friendly ways. IDB also conducts extensive research and shares knowledge through a vast array of publications and capacity-building opportunities.

Since 2004, IDB has been offering learning and capacity-building opportunities for the public sector in the LAC region, covering diverse topics in social and economic development. This offering has steadily grown and evolved over the last 18 years to include a variety of modes of online delivery. IDB’s learning initiatives focus on training professionals who work with and for its major partners in the public sector throughout the region. Open Badges are a perfect fit to open up the recognition of learning and achievement.

IDB stepped into the Open Badges landscape with two goals:

Provide recognition of learning achievement for its staff and public sector stakeholders across the LAC region.

Stimulate and support change for more open forms of recognition with digital credentials.

Due to the decentralized nature of its learning initiatives, Open Badges have developed in an organic and decentralized fashion at IDB, driven by contextual needs and evolving paradigms. IDB Credentials based on Open Badges have been used not only for ‘certifying’ formal learning but also for other less formal uses, such as event participation, individual contributions, and even community challenges and achievements.

IDB has become a significant issuer of Open Badges, particularly in the LAC region: it has developed a massive catalog of more than 500 badges and has issued more than 180 thousand individual badges as of August 2022. IDB’s insights from its impressive body of practice provides an opportunity for the organization to play a leading role in expanding the acceptance of Open Badges in the LAC region and in encouraging other players to issue and integrate these digital credentials in workforce development.

IDB understands that the success of Open Badges depends on their adoption by key stakeholders within the ecosystem, including issuers, earners, and consumers. To fulfill its leadership role in encouraging widespread adoption in the region, IDB has identified the need for a reliable and robust but flexible digital credential framework that can be widely shared and freely adopted and adapted by other organizations in LAC, influencing their approach to digital credentials with a useful reference guide that embodies authentic practice.

An IDB framework, based on its extensive real-world experience with Open Badges, will help consolidate trust in the authentic quality and usefulness of IDB credentials, increasing the acceptance and perceived value of these credentials by business and public sector leaders, and increasing the engagement of learners in earning and harnessing these credentials for lifelong professional learning and career advancement.

In the last two years, we have seen many frameworks that focused on micro-credentials, which have been produced primarily by academic institutions as a policy to drive their practice. The very concept of micro-credentials is an academic construct that many see as a “reaction” to Open Badges: they leverage many of the affordances of Open Badges, but their insistence on formal assessment narrows the scope for adoption of Open Badges as a tool for open recognition, often restricting their use to that of stackable “mini diplomas” that often work better for academic contexts than workplace needs. In contrast, IDB’s framework was deliberately developed outside an academic context, although it is well-informed by academic frameworks from several jurisdictions, in addition to the standards and practice frameworks of professional bodies and other organizations.

The proposed IDB Digital Credential framework is cross-sectoral. It works as a reference tool and roadmap to recognize knowledge building and continuous learning with digital credentials for the IDB Group, partner organizations, and citizens of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) region. The framework sets the stage with a “Manifesto” or set of guiding principles, followed by a detailed description of framework elements, whose characteristics vary by badge type within a coherent badge taxonomy that spans a spectrum of formality, including what many would call micro-credentials.

The IDB Digital Credential Framework is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY), so it can be easily adopted and adapted by organizations needing a wider lens for a digital credentialing system.