Friday, April 27, 2012

Open Badges Anchor Subject

It would seem to me that Scout badges would be a great anchor subject to focus the development effort for creating online learning resources for the OBI. To simplify things I will focus on the adults who have earned scout badges in their youth and would like to bring them forward into the digital world. The nice part of this is I don't have to deal with the under-age privacy issues that could appear within this anchor subject. Yet I have a mature source for badges with well defined assessment and award processes available. The scouts Canada site already has digital copies the badges within their store.


Use Cases
Using scout badges as my anchor subject will also open up all aspects of the OBI learning journey. Within it has the following high level use cases;
  • Wanting to display the scout badge (requiring a displayer service to be implemented)
  • Wanting to earn the scout badge (which will bring assessment into the learning discussion)
  • The ability to issue the scout badges (this would tie the issuing of the digital badge to the assessment. And kick-off the learning around assertion)
The technology
As with most of my current web development I will be using a mobile first strategy. This development / OER creation effort will also include a browser based portal, but the idea of implementing a mobile sash to display my scout  badges seems kinda cool to me.