Badged Open Courses – supporting five points of openness

Presentation (live if possible) from Badging for HE conference, UK http://livestream.com/UniversityofSouthampton/OpenBadges2016

This presentation will describe how Badged Open Courses, delivered and syndicated as Creative Commons-licensed OER by The Open University (OU), are having an impact on learners and on University practice. Piloted on OpenLearn in 2013, Badged Open Courses are now a business-as-usual activity for the OU, delivering a surprisingly high impact for both its social and business missions. The presentation will explore their history, current and future role in meeting the University’s commitment to openness while supporting students and meeting its outreach agenda. The University’s policy to create badged courses on OpenLearn delivers to five areas that support openness in education overall: open educational practices (designing a course and its assessment for an open environment), open educational resource (delivering under a Creative Commons licence), open source (the OpenLearn platform is Moodle), open syndication (multiple formats are syndicated as OER to the OU’s channels on third party platforms e.g. Amazon (for Kindle), iTunes U and Google play) and open badging (OU-branded digital badges are interoperable with the Open Badge Infrastructure.