Your badges are now Open Badges 3.0!

At Open Badge Factory, we’re committed to staying at the forefront of digital credentialing technology, ensuring that our customers always have access to the most advanced, reliable, and future-proof credentialing solutions available.

Open Badges 3.0 now in production

We’re thrilled to announce that, as of September 30th, both Open Badge Factory and Open Badge Passport have successfully transitioned to Open Badges 3.0—the latest evolution in digital credentialing standards. This means that all badges issued with OBF are now 3.0 badges, and Open Badge Passport can receive and manage 3.0 badges from any certified issuer. The 3.0 standard is now fully operational in both our platforms, which are 1EdTech certified, bringing enhanced security, portability, and credibility to all your digital credentials.

What makes Open Badges 3.0 special?

The most significant advancement in Open Badges 3.0 is its foundation on the W3C Verifiable Credentials standard—a globally recognized framework that extends far beyond education into the broader digital identity ecosystem.

Benefits for badge recipients and issuers

🔒 ENHANCED TRUST AND SECURITY

Open Badges 3.0 enhances the security of digital credentials through advanced cryptographic signatures, making badges significantly more tamper-proof and trustworthy. Due to this improved verification technology, the Open Badge concept has gained considerable credibility. It enables institutions and employers to validate credentials with complete confidence, knowing they’re authentic and unaltered. This generates significant value for badge issuers, recipients, and organizations alike.

Perhaps most importantly, because they are cryptographically signed and contain all the data needed for validation, 3.0 badges maintain their verifiability over time—even if the original issuing platform undergoes changes or ceases operation. This ensures that badge recipients’ achievements remain provable and valuable throughout their careers.

🌐 ENHANCED PORTABILITY

Portability is one of the key benefits of 3.0 badges. They can be stored in secure digital wallets and move freely across different platforms and systems. This means recipients are no longer confined to a single platform. Whether sharing badges with potential employers, integrating them into portfolios, or presenting them within learning systems, 3.0 badges work seamlessly across all these environments.

A Seamless Transition

For badge recipients and Open Badge Passport users, this upgrade is practically invisible. Everything you love about receiving, sharing, and displaying your badges works exactly as before. Both 2.0 and 3.0 badges display seamlessly in Open Badge Passport and all dedicated passport solutions we provide.

What’s new for badge designers

ADDITIONAL METADATA FIELDS

Open Badge Factory now offers badge designers the ability to utilize additional fields included in the 3.0 standard within the badge editor: Achievement Type • Credit Available • Field of Study • Code (Human Code) • Specialization

⚙️ FLEXIBLE CONFIGURATION

Since not all of these 3.0 standard fields are useful for every issuer, the default approach in Open Badge Factory is that Admin users select which fields are available in their environment. For “Achievement Type,” Admins can choose only the badge types that are relevant to their projects. The Admin’s selections appear in the badge editor as new fields that can also be applied to previously created badges. So if a customer wants to classify all badges created in their environment, this is entirely possible.

What’s particularly interesting is that badge creators can now add standardized metadata to their badges, making them searchable based on these criteria. For example, it’s now possible to search Open Badge Passport for all badges where the achievement type is “micro-credential.”

Supporting all forms of recognition

As is clearly visible in the “Achievement Type” classification, the needs and criteria of formal learning have strongly influenced the taxonomy created by the standard developers. This formal orientation is also inherent in the W3C Verifiable Credentials standard itself, which was originally built to recognize formal credentials. It’s obvious that this somewhat confusing classification responds quite poorly to the needs of open recognition for non-formal and informal learning contexts.

For this reason, we have supplemented the classification with several terms that better describe badges issued outside traditional educational settings. Open Badge Factory has always aimed to support open recognition across all learning contexts—formal and informal alike—and we will continue to enhance badge classification based on customer feedback to ensure this continues.

Looking forward

Open Badges 3.0 is overall a sign of positive development. It increases the credibility of Open Badges, expands their potential applications into new sectors, and at least in theory gives badge recipients more freedom and control (learner-centric). In practice, 3.0 works well for badge creation, but there are still many open questions related to ecosystem functionality and especially the development of wallet services, which involves not only technical development but also policy considerations that are still evolving.

Join our dedicated webinar

If you would like to hear more about the 3.0 standard and how it works now and in the future in Open Badge Factory and Open Badge Passport, we invite you to participate in a webinar that will be held on November 6th.