Badges for long-term school exchanges are online!

By now EFILife readers should be familiar with the term ‘Open Badges’ but if you are still not sure of what this is about, all you need to know is that Open Badges are a great tool for the recognition of non-formal learning!

Thanks to the Erasmus+ project European Badge Alliance, in the last year EFIL has been developing and testing an Open Badges system to be used during long-term secondary school exchanges, in particular the European Citizenship Trimester Programme (ECTP).

Now the Open Badge system EFIL developed is available online: you can look at the tasks required to claim each Badge and what learning we expect during an exchange programme. Organisations willing to use the Badge system and adapt it to their exchange programme, will need to log in on Badgecraft.eu create a new project and import the system ‘Long-term secondary school exchanges’ from the public library. Easy, right? On the website you will soon find videos explaining how to implement the systems.

EFIL will keep using this Open badge system for the ECTP. If AFS or other organisations are interested in starting using existing Open Badge systems or develop new ones, do not hesitate to ask EFIL for support!

The European Badge Alliance is opening up for other organisation to join. The condition is that they commit to test existing Badge systems, and/or be supported by the project partners in adapting the systems to their needs.

The project is now evaluating the piloting of the Open badge systems and developing policy recommendations accordingly. The objective is to ensure that Badges are integrated in the Europass CV and more widely used by educational organisations and valued by employers.

There will be a final conference of the project in Brussels in the last week of June 2017: save the week in your calendar!

 

For more information contact elisa.briga@afs.org