On 24 and 25 October the partners of the Erasmus+ project ‘European Badge Alliance’ (EBA) met in Bologna to share their first feedback on the piloting of badges frameworks and discuss the next steps of the project.
YEU and Semper Avanti have been testing the Youth workers mobility and EVS Badges framework, respectively. UNISER has developed the badges framework for VET mobility and has been testing it in October-November and will test it again next year in cooperation with AECA. EFIL has been piloting the youth workers mobility badges at the Training for Trainers and especially, has created a new Badge framework for long-term secondary school exchanges! We have been testing it within the European Citizenship Trimester Programme. The badge framework has been promoted from the beginning of the exchange directly to students and at the ECTP Brussels Camp. Now 140 ECTPersout of 250 have registered to the Badgecraft platform and almost 600 badges have been claimed! The framework will be made available on the EBA website soon, without AFS branding in tasks and images, for other organisations to use it.
Project partners are now working on feedback questionnaires for users of badges and in producing guidelines for youth workers on how to use the badges frameworks. We will also soon have a promotional video.
Finally, at the meeting partners started planning the next phase of the project, namely the one related to advocacy and dissemination, of which EFIL will be in charge in the next months. One objective is to reach out to many organisations and invite them to join the European Badge Alliance and start using the Badges frameworks developed. Also, many organisations are developing projects on badges and we want to link up with them, as we have done with the GO2B project, developing badges for class exchanges. Also, for this reason, EBA was presented at the Lifelong Learning Week, together with other projects on the validation of skills from non-formal and informal learning.
Another objective is to develop policy and practice recommendationson how to further use and promote badges. A good development in this sense is that Europass is being revised and is that the EU Council has mentioned Open Badges in its latest Conclusions on promoting new approaches in youth work to uncover and develop the potential of young people.
The next meeting will take place in Brussels on 14-15 March 2017 and the main focus will be the planning of the final conference which will take place in Brussels in June 2017.
To know more about the EBA project check the previous article here.
For more information: elisa.briga@afs.org
Photos: @EFIL