Beneficial and inspirational are just two of the many positive feedbacks received after a successful three-day long international training that took place between 6-8 July at the Institute for Continuing Engineering Education at BME. More than 20 participants – teachers, lecturers, course managers, department leaders and experts from Latvia, Lithuania, Greece, Malta and Hungary learnt about digitally signed certificates and micro-credentials, and acquired key skills through hands-on experiences in issuing and managing open badges and digitally signed credentials in several management systems.

Open educational resources, practices, and online courses via open-source virtual learning environments like Moodle, Ilias, MOOCs and different business environments are among the recent major developments in the field of digitalization of education. The improvement of digital certifications and credentialization techniques, standards, and systems are the next big tasks in this process.

The Digitally Signed Credentials and Open Badges in Vocational Education and Training and Higher Education – DISCO VET project (KA2 Strategic Partnership – 2020-1-HU01-KA202-078793-  funded by the European Union) has come up with a data structure of the course and content typology based on current European and national standards and new research. The resulting grid of extra metadata enabled a better mapping and manageability of the badges for VET, HE and CPD institutions.

Based on the grid, an open source displayer has been developed, accompanied by a 30-hour course on open badges and digitally signed credentials targeting people in learning management and administration, lecturing, or in any other role supporting students, lecturers or educational organisations by issuing or validating digital certificates of any kind.The course – available in English, Lithuanian, Greek, Spanish, Latvian and Hungarian – provides  the knowledge and tools to learn about the theoretical context and an easy step-by-step guide to create, issue and manage digital badges and certificates.

If you would like to know more about the course and the developed displayer system soon to be widely available, check out the project website: https://www.discovet.eu/