Overview

With the release of the 1EdTech Open Badges 3.0 standard Moodle will benefit from the implementation of OB 3 for future proofing of the system.  This is also an opportunity to reduce techdebt in the current implementation.

Objectives

• Implement support for OpenBadges 3.0 to enable badges to be exported to any new backpack
• Remove support for OB 1 as it is no longer used by any backpack provider
• Refactor the current OpenBadges 2.0 and implement OpenBadges v2.1 Badge Connect API specification when ratified

Update

An Initial analysis of the level of effort to implement OB3 has been conducted.  This would be a large piece of work as the current implementation was not structured in a way that would facilitate supporting multiple standards.  OB 2 implementation was to some extent hacked onto of the OB 1.  There are also significant additions and changes to the existing data structrures that will need to be taken into account for this work to be completed.

Initial analysis document is here

13/05/2024

  1EdTech has commenced voting on the finalised spec for OpenBadges 3.0, technical discovery work has now been scheduled for this increment to implement OpenBages 3.0.  Removal of tech debt and some refactoring in the OpenBadges 2.1 work is scheduled, with the removal of the OpenBadges 1.0 support also starting.

19/11/2024

The initial backend clean up has been delivered in Moodle 4.5 and the design proposals and technical design for implementing OpenBadges 3.0 has been completed.  Moodle HQ is investigating working with a interested university on the implementation as they are keen to accelerate this work.  An initial implementation of Open Badges is targeted for the 5.1 release, this is likely to be a minimal implementation which will not include all optional fields, this is to allow it to be used but we anticipate that the standard will evolve initially as it is very new and a large change from the 2.1 standard.  Further improvements will be scheduled for after the 5.1 release.

27/05/2025

Initial PoC for implementation has been commenced