What is a badge?

What is a badge?

Badges are a means of recognising certain skills and achievements acquired through online courses.

While these badges do not carry any formal credit and are not subject to the same rigour as formal assessment, you can share your achievement with friends, family and employers, and on social media such as Facebook or LinkedIn. You might like to include your badges or statement of participation on your CV as evidence of self-directed learning.

Badges are a great motivation, helping you to reach the end of the course. Gaining a badge often boosts confidence in the skills and abilities that are needed for successful study. So, completing this course might encourage you to think about taking other courses.

There is one badge you can collect from this course:

What is a statement of participation?

If you successfully achieve the badge, you will be able to access and download a statement of participation. This demonstrates your successful completion of the course, your interest in the subject and your commitment to your career. It also provides evidence of your continuing professional development. The statement of participation does not carry any formal credit towards a qualification as it is not subject to the same rigour as formal assessment.

You will be notified by email if you have received a statement of participation. Once it is available (as a PDF file), you will be able to see and download it from your OpenLearn Create profile.

It may take up to 24 hours for the statement of participation to be issued after you have completed the course.

If you experience any problems accessing your statement of participation, please contact openlearncreate@open.ac.uk.

What are the requirements?

While studying Supporting children’s development you have the option to collect a series of digital badges by successfully completing the quiz at the end of each section. Quizzes can only be accessed while studying the course online.

To obtain your badge, you need to:

• enrol on the course
• achieve four out of five correct answers in each associated quiz (you do get more than one attempt!).

Please be aware that quiz questions are based on course content. You are encouraged to engage with the content prior to taking the quizzes.

On successful completion you will receive email notification that your badge has been awarded and it will appear in your My badges area in your profile on OpenLearn Create. Please note it can take up to 24 hours for a badge to be issued.

Enrol on the course to collect your badge

To enrol on this course (and to ensure you can collect your badges) you will need to follow the simple steps below:

1. If you already have an OpenLearn Create account, just click on ‘Sign in’ to enrol and enter your user name and password.
2. If you don’t have an Open University account (for OpenLearn, OpenLearn Create, or your Open University student or tutor account), create your new account here
3. Follow the instructions, and when you have finished registration by reaching the My Account page, simply close the browser window or tab.
4. Refresh this page by clicking on the refresh button in your web browser – this usually looks like a recycling icon that features one arrow in a circle pointing to its tail, or two arrows in a circle pointing to each other. This will update your status so you can enrol.
5. The enrolment button is in the top right-hand corner.

You are now enrolled and ready to start the course!

How do I access my badge?

From within the course:

• Go to My profile and click on My badges.
• On the My badges page, to view the details of the badge or to download it, click on the badge and you will be taken to the Badge information page.

You will need to download your digital badges to your computer if you wish to share them with your employers or to add them to your CV and social media. You can also add the badge to your Mozilla Backpack, a software tool that allows you to collect your badges together in one place.

If you experience any problems accessing your badges, please contact openlearncreate@open.ac.uk.

How do I access my statement of participation?

When you have successfully passed all the quizzes and collected all the badges, you will receive an email containing details on how to download your statement of participation.

You will also find your successful completion of the course in your OpenLearn Create profile, including a link to My statement, where you can download the statement of participation or share it to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Now return to the course home page.

Acknowledgements

This free course was written by Isobel Shelton and Sue McKeogh (staff tutors at The Open University). Contributions were made by Katie Harrison (teacher and member of the ATL Union).

Except for third party materials and otherwise stated (see terms and conditions), this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence.

The material acknowledged below is Proprietary and used under licence (not subject to Creative Commons Licence). Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce material in this free course.

Every effort has been made to contact copyright owners. If any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity.