Pearson, the publishing heavyweight that now calls itself “the world’s leading learning company,” announced on Thursday
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Pearson, the publishing heavyweight that now calls itself “the world’s leading learning company,” announced on Thursday that it would follow Mozilla’s creation last year of an open standard for badges that recognize educational or professional achievement by offering a proprietary badge platform based on Mozilla’s standards.
For the new platform, which Pearson is calling Acclaim, the company will “work with academic institutions and high-stakes credentialing organizations to offer diplomas, certificates, and other professional credentials as Open Badges.” The badges, Pearson said, will complement “a paper-based representation of a credential by providing proof of an earner’s achievement in a web-enabled format that can be validated quickly and easily.”
“Open Badge-earners have complete control to display them wherever they choose—on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, a blog, or website—to prove their credentials,” the company said. “This allows potential employers to quickly and easily verify the qualifications of job applicants.”
The Mozilla standards were developed in a partnership with the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Badges have attracted interest from faculty members teaching face-to-face courses, who see them as potential rewards for completing portions of a syllabus, as well as from instructors teaching a variety of nontraditional offerings, from noncredit classes to massive open online courses.
