FAQ

What is an Open Badge?

Open Badges is an open standard developed by the Mozilla Foundation that helps in recognising and verifying learning, achievements and skills that we gain from everyday life, at work, hobbies and elsewhere. Using Open Badges is not limited only to the world of informal learning; for example educational institutions can showcase the learning that can be gained from their training programs for employers and therefore support the employment of their students.

An Open Badge is an image that contains metadata. The issuer of the badge can tell with this data information regarding the badge earner’s learning, skills or achievements. Badges can be issued by educational institutions, associations, companies as well as private people.

What is Open Badge Passport?

Open Badge Passport is an online service where badge earners can easily receive, manage and share their Open Badges. The service is free for personal use.

Is the service certified?

Yes, it is! IMS Global is responsible for developing the Open Badges standard and both Open Badge Factory and Open Badge Passport are certified by IMS Global.

Is it possible to get an organisation-specific Open Badge Passport?

Yes. Open Badge Factory’s Pro and Enterprise customers have the possibility to purchase a dedicated instance of Open Badge Passport for their organisation. They will for example receive their own login page and the service will be personified according to the organisation’s brand. This makes it possible for companies or large organisations to build Open Badge Passport communities for their own employees, clients and other interest groups.

Who is responsible of Open Badge Passport?

Finnish company Open Badge Factory Ltd is Open Badge Passport’s developer and is responsible for the platform.

Is Open Badge Passport open source software?

Yes. You can find more information here.

Is Open Badge Passport useful only for users of Open Badge Factory?

Open Badge Passport is fully compatible with the Open Badges standard. This means that all badges created using that standard can be transferred to Open Badge Passport. Badges can be uploaded as files from a computer.

Badges issued from Open Badge Factory will be automatically transferred into the earner’s Open Badge Passport if the earner’s email address used for issuing the badge has been saved to the badge earner’s Open Badge Passport account settings.

How can I remove my badges from Open Badge Passport?

You can save your badges to your computer and create an account to some other badge repository that supports the Open Badges standard and take your badges there. After this, you can delete your badges from Open Badge Passport. If you do this, badges shared via Open Badge Passport will stop working and you need to share the badges again from the other platform you are using.

Yes you can! Open Badge Passport provides easy ways for you to share your Open Badges in popular social media, such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Because the code is open source, community developers will be able to develop new sharing tools as social media services evolve.

Open Badge Factory and Open Badge Passport compliance with the EU General Data Protection Regulation.

We have been developing and providing high quality online learning services for many years and we have always been strongly committed to offer the best data security and personal data protection to our customers. As a service provider, we welcome the EU General Data Protection Regulation “GDPR” (679/2016) concerning the processing of personal data because it brings transparency and trust in personal data processing. We think that GDPR is beneficial for both users and service providers. As a European service provider, we fully comply with GDPR.

From a technical point of view GDPR brought only minor changes to Open Badge Factory and Open Badge Passport. Both services’ personal data has been processed as it is now ruled in GDPR from the beginning. For users, GDPR compliancy means that both services’ Terms of use have been updated. All OBF and OBP users will have to read and accept the new Terms and Conditions in order to access the services.

In both services a document called Privacy Notification (updated May 25, 2018) has been included into the Terms of use. This particular document describes in detail how personal data is stored and processed in the system and for what purposes.

Where Open Badge Factory and Open Badge Passport are hosted?

Both services are hosted in Finland by a professional operator providing services compliant with GDPR.

What is your data security policy?

We have implemented the appropriate technical and organisational measures to protect the personal data of the customer, taking into account all the risks of processing, especially the unintentional or illegal destruction, loss, alteration, unauthorised disclosures or access to personal data that has been transferred, saved or otherwise processed. OBF and OBP are protected by firewalls, monitored and administrated only by authorised staff members (sysadmins). A back-up of the services’ content is made once a day and it’s stored in secured facilities. The connection between the servers and user’s web browsers is SSL encrypted.

What personal data is stored in Open Badge Factory and Open Badge Passport?

See the Privacy Notifications (updated May 25, 2018). As a user you can see under your profile section your personal data listed in a log file.

In practice GDPR has really not changed the way badge earners use Open Badge Passport, because it has always been possible for a user to download their badges from OBP to their computer before deleting their account and all personal data. The only change was the possibility for OBP users to get a log file listing their personal data.