Badge Rewards

Since 2013, we have been set-up as a recognised issuer of Open Badges.  Open Badges started as a collaborative project between MacArthur Foundation, HASTAC and Mozilla and has continued to grow through an open, collaborative approach. It is designed, built and backed by a broad community of contributors, such as NASA, the Smithsonian, Intel, the Girl Scouts, and more. They are now also to be found on My Development Zone.

A digital badge is an online representation of a skill you’ve earned. Open Badges take that concept one step further, and allows you to verify your skills, interests and achievements through credible organisations. And because the system is based on an open standard, you can combine multiple badges from different issuers to tell the complete story of your achievements — both online and off. Display your badges wherever you want them on the web, and share them for employment, education or lifelong learning.

Badges are awarded by Development Zone when users complete certain tasks or finish certain courses and achieve the set benchmark score. They are a great way to engage learners and provide evidence to supervisors and training departments at appraisal time.

We also issue badges to reward staff for their general learning such as the unique Development Zone user of the month badge reward.Once users have their badges they can download a free backpack from Mozilla which allows them to store their badges and share them across social networks, a great way to display your credentials to potential customers.

As of the end of December 2016, we have issued 100,000 badge rewards on the site, which shows how engaging and useful they are to the learner.

Read our paper on our experience on Open Badges here: