Digital badge
A digital badge is a credential presented as a shareable image, with a linked record behind it that says who earned it, what for, and who issued it.
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An image with a record behind it
A digital badge is a credential designed to be displayed. The visible part is a small image, usually a circle or a shield carrying the issuer's mark and the name of the achievement, sized to sit on a profile or in an email signature.
The image is not the badge. Behind it sits a record stating who earned it, what they did to earn it, who issued it and when, and that record is what makes the badge a credential rather than a graphic. A badge image with nothing behind it is a picture, and anybody can make one.
Badge, certificate, micro-credential
These three are used interchangeably and mean different things. Two of them describe a format and one describes a scope, which is why the confusion persists.
- A certificate is a format: a formal document, laid out to be printed or filed, usually carrying signatures and a border. It is what an award looks like when the occasion is meant to feel weighty.
- A badge is also a format: the same underlying award, shaped to be shared and glanced at rather than filed. Nothing about being a badge makes an award smaller or less rigorous, though the convention is that badges carry narrower achievements.
- A micro-credential is a scope: a credential covering one narrow competence rather than a broad programme. It might be presented as a badge or as a certificate, and calling it a badge says nothing about how demanding it was.
The practical consequence for anybody reading a profile: the shape of the artwork carries no information about the standard behind it. The criteria do, and the badge is only useful if it links to them.
What has to sit behind the image
A badge worth displaying answers four questions without the viewer contacting anybody: who issued it, who earned it, what the criteria were, and how to confirm the first three. That last one is the one most badges fail.
A badge whose image can be right-clicked, saved and reused by somebody who never earned it is decoration. What separates a credential from decoration is that the record is reachable and checkable, which is what credential verification means and what a verifiable credential provides.
Open Badges is a standard, not a synonym
Open Badges is a specific technical standard for how badge data is structured so that software from different organisations can read it. A digital badge does not have to conform to it, and most do not.
The distinction matters when somebody says a badge "is an Open Badge": that is a claim about interoperability with other systems, not a claim about quality. For the record, badges issued through this platform are not Open Badges — they carry a signature and a verification page of their own rather than conforming to that standard. How badges work here sets out what that means in practice.
Related terms
- Micro-credential
A micro-credential certifies a single, narrowly defined competence, rather than the broad body of learning a diploma or degree represents.
- Open Badges
Open Badges is an open technical standard for digital badges, maintained by 1EdTech, which defines a machine-readable structure so that a badge issued by one organisation can be read and checked by software written by another.
- Verifiable credential
A verifiable credential is a digital credential that carries its own cryptographic proof, so its authenticity can be confirmed from the credential itself rather than by contacting whoever issued it.