The Mozilla Open Badges project has passed an important milestone, going from an invitation-only pre-beta phase to a full public Beta.
As we reported when Mozilla announced its Open Badges scheme, the idea is to allow learners to "show what they know" with an accreditation system that will support badges issued from multiple issuers across the Web.
Certified badge issuers will be allowed to award badges for activities such as after school programs, online learning and job training and collaborators include NASA, Intel, Disney-Pixar and 4H as well as the MacArthur foundation, which approved a $1 million grant to Mozilla for the Open Badge Infrastructure when it was initially launched.
The Open Badge Infrastructure has already been available in a limited way - with the initial issuer API and "Backpacks", the repositories for storing badges being available to a restricted set of testers, it is now going public with a "proper Mozilla beta" on Mozilla servers with security review, user data committee review and so on.
The beta includes:
New and improved issuer API
Backpack feature upgrades:
Store badges
Manage badges
Import badges
Group badges
Publish groups to a unique URL and add narrations/notes around each badge to share
New displayer API
There's also new documentation including privacy policy, terms of use and FAQs for users of Backpacks.
Further information about the beta can be found on the MozillaWiki and the source code is hosted on GitHub,
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