Glossary
What Is Open Badge?
An Open Badge is a digital achievement in a shared, machine-readable format, so the same badge can be checked and displayed by software that had nothing to do with issuing it.
Also called: Open Badges, Mozilla Open Badge
What it's for
A certificate as an image or a PDF says something to a human being and nothing at all to a computer. Nobody can search it, nobody can check it, and the moment it's forwarded twice it's just a picture. An employer looking at it has two options: believe it, or ring the issuer.
Open Badges fix that by putting the information inside the badge in a fixed shape every reader agrees on. Who earned it. Who issued it. What they had to do. When it was awarded, and whether it runs out. Because the shape is shared, a badge issued by a college in Kerala can be read by a job board in Berlin without either of them having agreed anything in advance.
How it works
The standard began at Mozilla in 2011 and is now maintained by 1EdTech, the education-standards body formerly known as IMS Global. A badge has three parts:
- The issuer profile — who is making the claim, with a stable web address.
- The achievement — what the badge is for, including the criteria someone had to meet.
- The award — the link between a named recipient and that achievement, on a date.
Older versions of the standard (2.0 and before) put this data in a JSON file hosted by the issuer, and often "baked" a copy into the badge image itself so the picture carried its own metadata. Verifying meant fetching the issuer's hosted copy and comparing.
Open Badge 3.0 changed that: the badge now carries a cryptographic signature, so a verifier can check it without the issuer's server being reachable at all.
Where you'll see it
Universities, professional bodies, and vendor certification programmes — AWS, Microsoft and Google Cloud all issue badges — plus most credentialing platforms. LinkedIn's Licenses & certifications section is the most common place a badge ends up being shown, though LinkedIn displays the link rather than reading the badge data.
In Verifycate
Every certificate you issue is also an Open Badge 3.0 credential, on every plan including the free one. It's built from the issuer profile on your workspace and the achievement on your certificate, and it's downloadable as JSON from the recipient's public page — so the credential is still readable if you ever stop using us.
Everything on this page runs in Verifycate. The first 300 certificates are free, no card. Start for free
Common questions
- What's the difference between an Open Badge and a certificate?
- A certificate is a document, designed to be read by a person. An Open Badge is structured data, designed to be read by software. They aren't alternatives — one certificate can be both, with the design a recipient shares and the badge data a verifier checks.
- Do I need to be an accredited body to issue Open Badges?
- No. There's no gatekeeper and no accreditation step — any organisation can issue them. What a badge asserts is that you say the recipient earned it; how much that's worth depends entirely on who you are.
- Can recipients keep an Open Badge if I stop using the platform that issued it?
- That depends on the platform. With Verifycate, the credential JSON is downloadable from the public page, and issued pages stay up after a workspace stops paying. Check this before you commit to any issuer — it's the question that matters most and the one least often answered.
Related terms
- Open Badge 3.0Open Badge 3.0 is the current version of the Open Badges standard, rebuilt on the W3C Verifiable Credentials data model so a badge carries its own cryptographic proof instead of relying on the issuer's server staying online.
- Digital BadgeA digital badge is a visual mark of an achievement that carries its own data — who earned it, who issued it, and what it took — inside the badge rather than in a separate record.
- Verifiable CredentialA Verifiable Credential is a claim about someone, signed by whoever made it, in a W3C format any verifier can check on its own — without contacting the issuer.
- Digital CredentialA digital credential is any record of an achievement, qualification or membership issued in a form a computer can read and check, rather than as a printed document or a flat file.
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Every certificate gets a QR code, a public page, and an Open Badge 3.0 credential. 300 free credits, no card.
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