Speexx Exchange Podcast – Episode 25:
Badges and Credentials – A new currency for the digital world? with Doug Belshaw

Intro 0:01   

Welcome to the Speexx Exchange podcast with your host Donald Taylor. As a renowned learning and development industry expert, as well as chairman of the Learning and Performance Institute, Donald sits down with experts from around the globe to talk business communication, learning technology, language, digital transformation, and engaging, upskilling, and reskilling your organization. This podcast is brought to you by Speexx, the first intelligent language learning platform for the digital workplace. Listen in, and you might learn a thing or two. 

Donald Taylor 0:36   

Welcome to this episode of the Speexx Exchange podcast with me, your host, Don Taylor. With me is Dr. Doug Belshaw, co-founder of the We Are Open Co-Op. He’s based in the UK, but those few words don’t do enough to introduce you to Doug Belshaw. So, Doug, can you let us know something about yourself? 

Dr. Doug Belshaw 0:57   

Yes, of course, Don, thank you. Well, I was born at a young age, and since then, I’ve grown up quite a bit. I guess you’re interested in my professional life? 

Donald Taylor 1:05   

Yes, I should have said, please tell us about your professional life. Otherwise, we could be here for a long time. 

Dr. Doug Belshaw 1:11   

So, as you can hear, probably from my accent, I grew up and now live in the Northeast of England. I was a teacher, to begin with, a history teacher. Then I was director of eLearning at an academy, a large Academy in the Northeast of England. I went to work for Jisc, who I’m guessing some of your listeners will know of; educational technology in higher education. I then worked for Mozilla, which is essential to what we will be talking about today. They’re the people behind Firefox, but they also do many other things. Then I went to work for City and Guilds as a consultant. City and Guilds are a vocational credentialing body quite old in the UK. There I started my own business and set up a co-op. Then I worked with Moodle quite a bit, the LMS provider. I helped them establish a decentralized resource-sharing social network. Then since last year, so since 2020, I’ve gone back to working full time through the co-op that I founded five years ago, called We Are Open. We’ve got all kinds of clients from Greenpeace, Creative Commons, for-profit, nonprofit charities, all different types of organizations. 

Donald Taylor 2:12   

Fair enough to say that you are based in both the world of open resources, sharing, and so on, and have a solid educational background. These two come together in the world of badges, credentialing, and so on. Now, we’ve had a chat before this, we’ve gone over the topic. I just want to pin this down, to begin with. Are we still calling them open badges? Or is it something else now? 

Dr. Doug Belshaw 2:37   

Don, one time someone came to me when I worked at Mozilla on the open badges team. They looked me in the eye and very seriously said to me, Doug, this will never take off unless you call them open medallions. I tried not to laugh in their faces. But what it highlights to me is that people have names that they want to give things. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what we call these things that we’re exchanging online, so long as they are established on a standard because the fact that they are based on a standard means that they are interoperable, to use the lingo with one another, and that you can exchange them and display them and all that kind of stuff. So yes, it is still the open badges standard. Maybe we can dig into who stewards that now, it’s not Mozilla anymore. If you search for this on Twitter and online, you’ll see terms like open badges, digital badges, micro-credentials, digital credentials, and verifiable credentials, that I’d love to talk more about. But yes, it is a fraction of the nomenclature, but the standard, which it’s all based on, is still called open badges. 

Donald Taylor 3:45   

Okay, so we have standard and open badges. There are many different varieties of ways that people can pull that over. Sadly, open medallion doesn’t seem to have taken off as terminology. I would be up for that; I’d want an open medallion. Can you tell us something about not open badges but this idea of credentialing regarding open badges? What’s the difference between credentialing and badges? What makes a verifiable credential? 

Dr. Doug Belshaw 4:11   

That’s an interesting question. I could talk about this all day. 

Donald Taylor 4:15   

That’s why you’re here, though. We like having people who know what they’re talking about. 

Dr. Doug Belshaw 4:18   

So, if you think about what a credential is, then we take it right back down to brass tacks. Okay, so what I’m trying to do when I’ve got a credential is I’m trying to prove at a distance that something is the case. Okay? So, you can imagine a Roman Emperor sending a messenger with a scroll and his official seal, and it’s kind of a credential to show that this is legitimate. On my wall, I have my doctoral certificate, which has a lovely hologram from Durham University, which proves that, you know, this is a verifiable credential or whatever. But when we’re issuing badges to each other, are we always issuing credentials? So, the argument I would usually give and other people who think in the same way that I do about badges, not everyone does, and that’s fine, is that if you imagine this visually, the circle, that is the badge, is larger than the circle inside it, which is a credential. So, not every badge is a credential. Some people would disagree with that. So, it begs the question, if a badge isn’t a credential, what is it? Interestingly, there’s a whole movement, especially in France, around open badges being used for recognition. In fact, if you go to openrecognition.org, you’ll see a bunch of people in France and Canada and other places start talking about, well, how can we recognize skills, qualities, dispositions, whatever in other people in a peer-to-peer way, not in a hierarchical way through that kind of badging. So, they would reject that badges always have to be credentials. 

Donald Taylor 5:52   

I’m very interested this is coming out of France with its traditions, we think of Napoleon decreeing that the whole of France should use the metric system, rather than the local systems they were very successfully using. So, it’s very interesting that that should be the home for it. Essentially, at the core of that, we have this idea that you’ve got something which can be used to verify that somebody, let’s say, is able to do something or has done something.   

Dr. Doug Belshaw 6:19   

And you can use it for that.  

Donald Taylor 6:20   

Yeah, but that requires somebody’s impromptu if I can use that phrase, which is what the Pope does when he gets his ring and puts in molten wax. That’s literally the impression of the Pope’s ring. So, have I got that right? 

Dr. Doug Belshaw 6:36   

Yes, absolutely, you have to have some kind of verification. So, let’s think about what it means for something to be verified. So, for example, an emperor, the Pope, dawned with his big ring or medallion, pressed into wax, whatever it is, this verifies, and we trust this verification principle. But there are other ways in which we can verify stuff. So, for example, if you’re using an online Messenger, and it’s end to end encrypted, we want a way to verify that that encryption took place. That is kind of built into the open badges standard, as well. So, there’s at least a couple of ways right now that you can verify credentials or open badges or whatever you want to call them. One is what’s called a hosted assertion. So, what this means is that let’s say a university or an organization, or whoever issues a badge, and you click through, and it takes you through to that website and says, yes, this is a legitimate badge. You can already, at the back of your mind, think about what problems there might be with that, given that things on the web tend to disappear. We call it link rot. So, badges which were issued even a few years ago, through hosted assertions, you know, the proof of that doesn’t exist anymore. So, you can do it in a cryptographic way; you can kind of cryptographically sign and make sure that this issuer at the time of issuing existed, and they kind of gave their seal of approval to this badge as well. So, there are different ways in which we can verify it. Sometimes when I work with clients and different people in the system, I ask them, well, what do you mean when you talk about verification? What does verification mean to you? One thing we might want to come back to is the different levels of verification or proof or that kind of stuff, compared to the importance of the badge. So, suppose someone was issuing me a badge for my doctoral certificate. In that case, they probably want more proof or more verifiability than if it was like a recognition badge that you turned up to an event, like a Learning Technologies event or something like that. There are different levels of verification. What tends to happen is that people want what I would call the nuclear option. Let’s stick everything on a blockchain for everything, which I think is a bit ridiculous, to be honest. 

Donald Taylor 8:43   

So, that’s great. I mean, I like this idea that verification comes down to asking ourselves, how do we know this is true. There are levels of credibility around that from the emperor or the Pope’s seal down to something which is much more casual but suits the level of verification required for this particular thing. Whatever it is. 

Dr. Doug Belshaw 9:05   

Yeah, and let’s make a homely example. Let’s say that you issued me a badge, Don, for being a guest on this podcast. Yeah, but because you’ve got such a massive address book, you accidentally issued it to Doug Levin or something like that. So, Doug Levin gets this badge and thinks, I think I’ll just accept that and start expanding his profile. The consequence of that, I would suggest, is somewhat less than had Durham University issued a doctoral certificate to Doug Levin. So, they would have different consequences in the real world. 

Donald Taylor 9:35   

Absolutely. So, that’s an excellent example, thank you. While we’re on blockchain, can we just look at it? I’m not hugely wild about blockchain, but it is something that is in our lives and won’t go away. When people talk to you, I’m guessing they always say, oh, Doug, badges, blockchain. You need both, don’t you? Is that right? 

Dr. Doug Belshaw 9:54   

So, I started a research group with some other people about five years ago about this. I quit the research group that I founded because I was just like, there is no need for this. More recently, having talked to some people in the space who provide blockchain credentials, I’ve realized that in some situations, given that it’s seemingly solved some of the problems and issues I had with it, let’s get away from the abstract into the specifics. If you put something on a blockchain, then it is immutable. By immutable, what we mean is it can’t be changed. That’s kind of the whole point. That’s why you can run decentralized banking systems often. If you could change it after the fact, people could double-spend their money. If something’s immutable, and you make a mistake, well, how do you revoke the badge? You know, let’s use the doctoral certificate again. I’ve accidentally issued a doctoral certificate to my son or completely the wrong person. There are ways you could do that, but it’s awkward. The thing which I thought at the time was the nail in the coffin for blockchain-based badges was the GDPR. The GDPR means that you have a right to be forgotten and remove your data and make it more private. Interestingly, I don’t want to go into the specifics of one badging platform based on blockchain. But when I’ve spoken to blockchain-based providers more recently, they seem to have found a way around that. But it seems to be a bit of a hack rather than based on the actual open badges standard. So, my short answer to what you just said was, blockchain can be helpful, but it’s probably not going to be what you need for most badges that you issue. 

Donald Taylor 11:34   

That’s a great answer, perhaps a level of authentication beyond what you require. We’ve been talking about badges almost as if we’re taking what they’re used for granted. Let’s just take a step back and say, well, what are they used for? They were huge five years ago. Everyone was talking about them then. Are they still big now? Or is it something that’s just died out? 

Dr. Doug Belshaw 11:57   

Yes, so most people in the L&D space are familiar with the Gartner Hype Cycle. So, open badges were right at the top of that hype cycle, like, I don’t know, seven years ago. 

Donald Taylor 12:08   

Yes, seven is a better timeframe.  

Dr. Doug Belshaw 12:10   

Yeah, so if you’ve seen the Gartner Hype Cycle, you slide down into the trough of disillusionment, which is a wonderful term. Then you have this slope of enlightenment. I feel like we’re now on the plateau of productivity, as it’s called on the Gartner Hype Cycle. Now, what we mean by a plateau of productivity is that people aren’t necessarily talking about using them, but they are using them. So, a couple of years ago, I was over in Washington, DC. The Inter-American Development Bank was interested in issuing badges alongside these multi-billion-dollar loans they’re giving to countries to show the impact of the work they’re doing. So, they’re using badges, and I’m still in contact with them. My favorite example is IBM; because IBM has a spouse position of wanting to hire fewer people with four-year degrees in the US, they want to hire more people who have the specific skills they need. The things that they point to are the kinds of changes that happen within the landscape. You might agree, or you might disagree with their rationale for this. But they say that things happen so quickly that you could start and finish a four-year degree and be out of date by the time you finish it. So, they’d rather have a much more kind of piecemeal skill-based hiring based on these verifiable achievements. So, if you just type in like IBM badges, there are so many different kinds of badges that they issue for all sorts of stuff. I’m on the IBM Skills website now, and they’ve got one with Adobe around basic design principles. They’ve got things around enterprise design thinking, cybersecurity fundamentals, emerging tech, all different kinds of stuff. Now, you might think, well, why is IBM allowing anyone to do these badges? Isn’t that a massive investment? However, not only does it mean that they can offer these to their existing staff, but if they make them available to anyone, anywhere in the world, they’re doing marketing and talent acquisition at the same time. If anyone can go for the badge, let’s say it’s quite a traditional kind of thing where you do a bit of eLearning, you do an assessment at the end, and someone is going through these badges and smashing it and getting 100% and all this kind of stuff. Well, maybe this person might be a good fit for your company for your position. It might not just be IBM who wants to hire those people. It could be anyone, and it could be anyone who, you know, can see these badges and think they might be a perfect fit for what we’re doing as well. So, all of a sudden, badges become not just credentials, which you’re using to get this particular job that you’ve decided you want to get, but it’s almost like a signal to the market if you will, and a way that organizations can market what they’re about. So, for me, I’m on the side of open recognition. So, badges can be credentials, but they can also do more. Another fascinating example is in Scotland, one of the care commissions, they’re the kind of organization that issues these big chunky reports that nobody reads. A few years ago, they started issuing badges related to the recommendations in the report. What that did was even if you didn’t read the report, you were incentivized to implement the recommendations from the report in your everyday practice. So, they saw the report had much more of an impact in the real world because they’d aligned budgets with it. So, you can do so many different things, and I find that fascinating. That’s why I’ve been unreasonably excited about a metadata standard for ten years. 

Donald Taylor 15:49   

Can you have that on a t-shirt, please? You are unreasonably excited by a metadata standard for ten years, marvelous. I think this business is about recognition and verification incentive, and I think the verification piece is part of it. I also think the question is, why are you using a badge? You’ve given an excellent case study for IBM and clearly explained why they are in the UK or internationally now. EY, the consultancy, is running a tech MBA. People can do a series of badges internally going through things, which is not just learning stuff on a course, but going and implementing it and doing things and coming back, and that is run in association with Hult International Business School. The result is that people can now get their MBA, very often EY employees from outside the UK, outside Europe, who probably would never have the chance of receiving an MBA from a top school like Hult. They write into the chapter event, Riaz Shah is absolutely full of support, saying that he’s changed their lives with this. The whole thing is built on this series of badges that they put together to get to the MBA. It’s, like I say, very practical stuff. It’s not just that you sit through a bunch of courses. So, in these cases, the Scottish report, the IBM, you, and the EY, you mentioned this point about badges acting as an incentive. Is it the case that whether it’s recognition by other people or incentive for yourself to go and do something, but in both cases, badges should be verified? Because if they’re not, then there’s less incentive? If there’s not, then the recognition won’t be as strong because people will say, I trust this badge less because I can’t verify it. Does verification underpin both of those aspects of that? 

Dr. Doug Belshaw 17:34   

Yeah, again, it’s different. What are people impressed by at the end of the day, like what causes people to go, Hmm? Interestingly, I got my doctorate simultaneously, literally the same time as starting at Mozilla. For me, mentioning that I’m Dr. Belshaw in a non-academic setting didn’t mean that much. Whereas saying that I’d worked for Mozilla was almost like a credential by itself. So, being able to prove that I work for Mozilla is professionally useful to me. I can do that through badges. I can do it by pointing to things that I’ve done on the web, you know, YouTube videos, where I’ve spoken at events, and it’s got a Mozilla thing, whatever. So, we already kind of do this, you know, when we’re trying to get people to understand what we’re talking about here and verifying things and aligning ourselves. We talk about, well, you choose the car you drive, you choose the way you dress in different situations, you’re sending out signals. If you think about badges as signals, that’s quite interesting, too. You mentioned motivation, kind of in passing there. I think it’s interesting that people often think that badges in and of themselves will motivate people to want to do stuff. I just like to kind of deal with that right now for two reasons. Firstly, if we remove the badge and just imagine going back to paper, we would never say, oh, well, if we give people certificates, maybe that will motivate them to do stuff. That would sound a bit ridiculous. Yet people think if it’s badges and because it’s online, it must be cool, and people will be interested. The second thing is that there’s some significant research in psychology into crowding out intrinsic motivation. So, some people think about intrinsic, extrinsic motivation as a binary, some people think of it as a spectrum, I feel more like a spectrum. If you think about the two ends of that spectrum, if somebody is intrinsically motivated to do something, and suddenly you come along with an extrinsic motivator, the psychological research shows that what it does is crowds out that intrinsic motivation, and all of a sudden, that goes to the wayside. They’re chasing after the shiny thing now, and they just want recognition. So, it’s crucial when you’re badging stuff to recognize what people are already motivated to do, and maybe not just stick a badge on it, because it sounds cool. 

Donald Taylor 17:35   

It’s an excellent point. We should add that it may even act as a disincentive because there is lots of research to suggest that if you, for example, offered to pay somebody for doing something, even if it’s a pretty small amount that they were going to do anyway, out of the goodness of their heart, they will not only not want the money, but they’ll be less inclined to do it in the first place because now you’ve put a price against something, which they believed had some sort of value above any price. 

Dr. Doug Belshaw 20:24   

I’ve got a perfect example of that. A friend of a friend who used to work at a private school volunteered for this position for years. It was coordinating stuff, and it took a lot of his time up, and everyone was very thankful. People stood up and gave speeches to say how grateful they were. Then they decided in a reorganization, it was now going to be remunerated, and they put a figure on it, and he resigned. 

Donald Taylor 20:47   

He would have been doing the same thing but getting paid for it. But that wasn’t the point. He resigned because it pulled away the motivation for him. 

Dr. Doug Belshaw 20:55   

He thought it was a slap in the face.  

Donald Taylor 20:56   

Exactly. Let’s come back to this business of verifiable credentials. Because we’ve been talking about verification, we’ve been talking about the role of badges and how they can be used very effectively for different things, or perhaps we shouldn’t use them at all. But when we’ve been talking about this in the past, Doug, you’ve been talking about verifiable credentials. I’d just like to clarify it in people’s minds. What’s that in contrast to open badges? 

Dr. Doug Belshaw 21:23   

Okay, so in the L’Oreal adverts a few years ago, they used to say, here comes the science bit. So, in 2017, IMS Global Learning Consortium took over the stewardship of badges from Mozilla. 

Donald Taylor 21:39   

We have a very international audience, so stewardship means looking after something. 

Dr. Doug Belshaw 21:42   

Yeah, making sure that the standard is looked after and developed further. Yes, that’s the main point. 

Donald Taylor 21:48   

So, this organization, IMS, is looking after the standard, maintaining it, and developing it. 

Dr. Doug Belshaw 21:55   

Yes. Now, IMS Global Learning Consortium is a nonprofit organization that works globally on many different standards. You pay to be a member and organizational member of the IMS Global Learning Consortium. That gives you access to have a say in how the standards are developed. That is very different from the way that things were done in a community way at Mozilla. So, over the last few years, there have been lots of standards in the world, if you know your money travels around the world, you must take plug adapters with you a lot. You have to plug different things in, and you have standards for how things connect and whatever. One of the marvels of the modern age is that we can use any web browser and go to any website, and it just works, which didn’t use to be the case 20 years ago. We can do that because the World Wide Web Consortium, the W3C as it’s known, has all of these standards. People who work for Google and Microsoft, and other smaller companies can come together and say how the web should develop further and make sure that everything works. The W3C has what is now known as the verifiable credentials standard. This has kind of been resurrected and is quite a new thing. The exciting thing about this is that we live in a world where we increasingly need to digitally prove who we are and unlock stuff. You can think about this on a reasonably trivial level, like the fact that I haven’t taken a normal leather wallet out of the house for over a year now. I always pay on my phone, like that is a form of credential, a payment credential. So, what we’re doing here potentially, is aligning open badges with this much larger standard in terms of verifiable credentials. It also takes this standard and lifts it outside of the world of IMS, and this has been controversial. It continues to be controversial. At the time we’re speaking, it is unsure which way things will go. There will continue to be a standard in which you can issue badges, but whether it aligns with this kind of newer, verifiable credential standard or whether it gets subsumed to another IMS standard is open to debate. If you’re thinking about issuing badges, this won’t affect you that much because all the different providers you would use, like Badger, Credly, and Accredible will use whatever standard emerges from this. You’ll be able to use them just as you can now. But for those interested in technical details, there’s loads of exciting work going on. I would like to specifically point out that when you’ve got a technical standard, you’ve also got a culture of assumptions around it about how they will be used. An IMS is firmly in the kind of formal education camp. Open badges didn’t come from that world. It came from a much more informal learning world. So, there’s a little bit of fire and ice going on here. It’s fascinating for those of us who are grabbing popcorn and sitting by the side and seeing what’s going to happen. 

Donald Taylor 24:53   

If anybody doubts that badges are important and there is a market out there for them, can you give us some numbers, Doug? 

Dr. Doug Belshaw 25:03   

Yeah, so it’s tough when you’ve got a decentralized standard. So, if you’ve got a centralized standard, then you can just look and say, okay, well, this is how many things have been issued. When you’ve got a decentralized standard, where there’s no one in the middle counting things up, you kind of have to guess. IMS did this last year, and they decided that about 43 million badges had been issued. But if you go to the Credly website, they’ve already issued 40 odd million by themselves. So, there are 10s of millions of badges. IBM claims to have issued something like 200 million or something, it’s insane. So, with huge numbers of badges, it might be worth talking about the size of the market. So, I get emails, pings, and all this kind of stuff from people writing reports on this. About 18 months ago, one from LinkedIn, Holon IQ, said that the micro and the alternative credential market is one of the fastest-growing education and technology markets. They reckoned it was worth about $9.9 billion. I can break that down if you’re interested. 

Donald Taylor 26:08   

Go on, that’s a significant number. 

Dr. Doug Belshaw 26:09   

If we think about online courses and badges, we’re talking about those issued by kind of Coursera, Degreed, edX, and LinkedIn, and people like that; they reckon that’s worth about $3.8 billion. If we go to professional certifications, so this is people like Kaplan or AWS, doing technical, professional certifications, that kind of thing. It’s about 2.9 billion. It could be like lawyers and nurses and finance and stuff like that as well. The next one, which is usually the one that people talk about the most, I would say, which is online, a kind of non-degree certificates, post-secondary micro-credentials. That’s what people tend to talk about. Again, this might be specific institutions like Georgia Tech, or it might be like Future Learn, which I’m sure many of you are aware of, or organizations like that. That’s about 2.3 billion. Then there are boot camps. So, like the learn to code movement or anything like that, that’s about 9.9 billion. But again, this was 18 months ago, and it’s growing all the time. We’ve had a pandemic since then, where everything’s moved online. So, 9.9 billion is a lowball estimate of how massive this market is. 

Donald Taylor 27:18   

So, it started at 10 billion 18 months ago, and is one of the fastest-growing, Doug, like you were saying. So, this is something which you have at least got to inform yourself about even if you are skeptical about badges. So, Doug, if people want to know more about this, where should they be going? 

Dr. Doug Belshaw 27:36   

There are lots of places you could start. You could start with the issuers themselves. So, you could go to the openbadges.org website, which IMS Global Learning Consortium runs, and click through to the individual issuers. The co-op that I’m part of runs a wiki, using the same software as Wikipedia, that’s just at badge.wiki. If you just search my name and open badges, you’ll come up with a load of stuff as well. Maybe we can stick some stuff in the show notes. 

Donald Taylor 28:04   

I will put some great links, drawing on that in the show notes, Doug, because I suspect many people who have been listening to this have galvanized their interest and want to go further. Thank you so much; as you said, you could talk about one aspect of this for the entire day. I know there’s a vast amount we can learn from you. But we have to wrap up. But we always end the show with the same two questions. What do you wish you’d known, and what are you curious about? So firstly, what do you wish you’d known when you started in this whole field? 

Dr. Doug Belshaw 28:32   

Well, the rhetoric around open badges, to begin with, was like, it’s going to be the end of higher education, we’re only going to be badges to each other. That was such a distraction because the open recognition part of it, the non-credential part of it, is, for me, the most interesting bit. I wish we’d double down on that community side of things then because the credentialing is interesting, but it’s not the most important bit of open badges to me. 

Donald Taylor 28:58   

What are you curious about? I suspect the answer is a lot of things but pick one thing that you’re curious about right now. 

Dr. Doug Belshaw 29:04   

I’m interested in organizing ourselves together as human beings and deciding how to do things without hierarchy. My feeling is that we have this default operating system, almost like army-like hierarchical organization stuff. But I’m now part of a co-op. I’m part of a network of co-ops where there isn’t any hierarchy. We have different ways of doing this, and I feel like badges can help figure out how we can interact with each other and do important stuff without the patriarchy always deciding what we do. 

Donald Taylor 29:38   

It’s an excellent answer. We’ll come back when you’ve got it figured out, and you can tell us how we can grow and work without the need for hierarchy and management. Doug, as always great to speak to you. Thank you so much for coming on. I know that we’ll be talking again very soon. 

Dr. Doug Belshaw 29:55   

Thanks for having me.