BADGEONS LA NORMANDIE
Developing, recognising, valorising and connecting the talents of Normans
Launch statement and call for expressions of interest
The agricultural technical and higher education establishments and the farming profession wish to explore the potential of Open Badges to build with their partners an ecosystem facilitating the recognition and valorising of people and skills in the context of lifelong and lifewide learning.
BADGEONS LA NORMANDIE is part of a global movement aiming at promoting access for all to the recognition of learning achievements. This movement was initiated by the Bologna Declaration for an Open Architecture for Recognition of Lifelong Learning (http://www.openrecognition.org/), supported by a set of experts, organizations and individuals in the world of education, business and in the social and humanitarian world.
BADGEONS LA NORMANDIE is open to all those wishing to explore the power of Open Badges for building a learning territory: developing, recognising, valorising and connecting the talents of Normans. Individuals, institutions, associations and organisations working in education and training, employment and social integration are welcome to join.
Public and private agricultural education establishments in Normandy are leading a series of projects dedicated to giving meaning to learning, reinforcing learners’ personal career project, recognising and valorising learning achievements, formal and informal.
UniLaSalle Rouen, as a higher education establishment, promotes students’ cultural and solidarity actions, considering that they are contributing to the acquisition of organizational skills and responsibilities. BADGEONS LA NORMANDIE will be an instrument used for recognising skills needed for business and the integration in today’s and tomorrow’s society.
The Regional Chamber of Agriculture of Normandy (CRAN) leads a Regional Pilot Project for agro-ecology associated with a large number of partners including agricultural training centers. The Regional Chamber shares common concerns, especially on the need to identify know-hows and emerging skills, and the recognition of good practices and initiatives in the territories. Hardly or not recognized currently, they are a force of innovation and transformation whether environmental, social and cultural.
The partners have identified four areas in which they want to collaborate :
- Individuals: fighting against school dropout and failure, self-esteem and empowerment;
- Employment: facilitating employability and occupational mobility;
- Territory: identifying and valorising good practices and initiatives in the territories;
- Digital world: working on digital inclusion (social and professional integration by digital mobilization).
They have defined as common goals for their projects:
- Facilitating the recognition and valorisation of skills and learning, formal and informal;
- Preparing learners for lifelong learning;
- Identifying emerging skills, connecting them with the job market;
- Implementing digital tools to foster the learner’s ability to act autonomously.
After a day dedicated to innovative digital systems for the recognition of learning outcomes organized by the Regional Authority for Food, Agriculture and Forestry of Normandy (DRAAF) on May 23rd, 2016, the participants massively voted in favour of experimenting Open Badges.
What are Open Badges?
In 2011, the Mozilla Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation created the Open Badges as a means to address the lack of instruments for the recognition of informal learning. Today, Open Badges are used to recognize learning, skills, participations, achievements, roles or people. Recognition can be formal (e.g. certification or accreditation) or informal (e.g. endorsement by peers) and collections of badges can be used by people to build profiles, institutions to establish learning paths and territories to map out their talents. They can be used to connect different pieces of information, for example skills with people, teaching resources, knowledge, places, etc.
Open Badges are simple technical objects (a picture with metadata) that can be implemented at different levels: individual, course, organisation, network or a territory.
The main information (metadata) recorded in a badge are:
- Recipient: the person to whom was the badge issued
- Issuer: the person or institution who issued the badge
- Criteria: what does the badge show / indicate, the criteria for receiving it
- Evidence: the artefacts provided by the recipient to match the criteria
Open Badges are unfalsifiable, verifiable and anonymised.The Open Badge infrastructure guarantees the integrity of the information they contain: it is not possible to steal a badge from someone else or to issue a badge pretending being someone else. To enforce privacy, the identity of the recipient is protected (encrypted).
Supported by the Badge Alliance (a set of organizations, individuals and international experts), the Open Badges standard will now be maintained by IMS Global1, an international consortium with more than 160 contributing organizations. This gives us a guarantee of sustainability and interoperability.
How?
In order to facilitate its implementation and its opening to all the stakeholders in the territory, BADGEONS LA NORMANDIE is divided into sub-projects. The current sub-projects that partners can join are listed below. New sub-projects will be defined when new partners will join.
The first projects are :
- Norman agricultural education Badges: recognition of informal learning, citizenship engagement (in link with the Ministry of agriculture);
- Norman agro-ecology Badges: recognition and valorisation of innovative practices in agroecology;
- Youth Badges : recognition of people and training programs within regional education policies (Working group between agricultural education and CEMEA- popular education)
The actions currently being considered within the different projects are :
- Communicating and developing an open and shared permanent culture on Open Badges;
- Identifying informal learning that may be badged in agricultural education institutions;
- Building a shared badge design methodology (building the badge ecosystem);
- Implementing a badge valorising platform that can be used by all partners (Open Badge Passport Experimentation);
- Training to use badges;
- Designing learning pathways / playlists illustrated by badges;
- Reflecting together on the development of badges-based services
- Studying in synergy with already implemented ePortfolio projects
- Producing a documented and transferable approach to other territories and sectors of activity.
The Steering Committee
The steering committee is currently composed of:
- The DRAAF
- The CRAN
- UniLaSalle
How to join or support the initiative?
You have two possibilities :
- You want the initiative to succeed, but you cannot participate at this stage: ask for the Support Badge
- You want to be part of the initiative and experiment with Open Badges: ask the Participant Badge -> we will contact you
-> badge application forms are on the web page of this statement