# Design, Development and Use of a Digital Badges System in Higher Education
## Appendix A Mozilla Open Badges  
Open Badges is a project developed by the Mozilla Foundation. As described previously, a digital badge is an online depiction of some ability or skill acquired by an user. Open Badges carries that concept one step further, and it additionally allows the users to verify and prove their abilities, interests and achievements by means of credible third party organizations. Moreover, Open Badges defines a standard to display these data on the image of the badge file.  
Because the system is based on an open standard, those who win the badges can collect them even if they are issued by different entities, and keep a record of the portfolio of achievements. Open Badges can be summarized into four principles:  
* Open and free to any organization that intends to use it for generating, delivering, or verifying digital badges.
* Transferable. It gathers the badges coming in from multiple sources in a single place.
* Incremental. Whether they have been issued by an organization or by several ones, the badges can be piled up to build a history of achievements and skills.
* Provable. Every badge contains significant and valid information embedded into its file image, so that it is easy to read the information about the generator, its criteria, and its trustworthy.  
Open Badges is a standard that largely eases the task of obtaining recognition for the acquired knowledge and for the knowledge taught. Similarly, for verifying claimed abilities, and for publishing the badges received from anywhere in the web.  
Regarding the interaction with the Badges module, the spreading of the Open Badges standard has been focused to certify the skills adquired by the students upon the winning of public badges. To this end, public badges do not depend on the existence of a group in the social network, so they can be made visible to any other user of the system. The standard makes mandatory the existence of 3 JSON files enclosing some attributes and an image of the badge, so as to generate the image to be shown as badge in the Mozilla Backpack, which is the companion interface for each user wherein all his/her badges gained in the past can be kept.  
The required JSON files must contain, at a minimum, the information shown in Tables 1-3.  
Figure 14: Generation of certificates that are visible in SocialWire.  
Though most of this information can be directly read from the description if badges created with our platform, there remain some aspects that still ask for direct participation of the student and the creator of the badge too. For this, a few forms have been included in some views of the plugin in order to introduce the required information. First, the creator of the badge and eventually later the distributor of the corresponding certificate will be asked to input the data appearing in Table A3 (Figure A1). This task can be carried out at the moment when the author enters the detailed view of a badge having a visibility of public type. Secondly, when the certificates are generated, the students will receive the public badge and will be able to publish it in the list of achieved badges, in the platform. From this point on, it is the responsibility of the student to generate the certificate compliant with Open Badges. To than end, the recipient of the badge only needs to go to the view \"My badges\" and introduce the email address associated with the personal Mozilla Backpack account, so that the file containing the badge image with all the information specific to the badge can be downloaded and stored (Figure A2). This file can be directly uploaded to the Open Badges account, and the process will be finished (Figure A3).