What is OBI?

The Open Badges Infrastructure (OBI) is free software and an open technical standard that allows an organization to create, issue, and verify badges. Because OBI is a standard, learners can earn badges across and a variety of issuers. This OBI standard also includes standard metadata to be read by employers and institutions and works with the Mozilla Backpack.
>>Read more about the OBI.

What is an OBI Provider?

As you read previously, an issuer is an individual or institution that offers badges to ‘earners’ for successfully completed ‘learning experiences’. They handle all of ‘issuing’ of the badges, allowing ‘earners’ to push badges into their Backpack. In this lesson, we will specifically be looking at a few examples of OBI Issuers who are actually Providers. Providers allow individuals and organizations to create their own learning experiences while using their system to create, store, and issue badges.

How do you issue badges through an OBI Provider?

Step 1. Develop a learning experience.

Peer to Peer University (P2PU)
learning experiences and badge issuing
P2PU is one example of a Provider that not only allows individuals to issue badges, but also to create and distribute learning experiences.
>>Read more about P2PU.
>>Create a Course or Challenge on P2PU.
>>Take a P2PU course on making and implementing badges on P2PU.

Step 2. Develop a badge(s) for the learning experience.

Your next step is to actually design the badge(s). If you don’t have much design experience, you may want to ask a friend for help.
>>Read Billy Meinke’s article on how to make a badge.
>>Read the second point in this Badg.us article, filled with resources for creating badges.
>>Take the P2PU Badge Maker Course.

Step 3. Issue the badges.

If you are already using an OBI and learning experience provider like P2PU, they will handle the issuing for you. However, if you have developed your learning experience on a personal site, such as a Wordpress blog or learning management system, then you will need an OBI Provider like one of the following. You will have to follow this procedure for every badge.

Badges.p2pu.org
Here you can create a Badge, submit a Project for a Badge, or, if you are an "Expert" and already possess the Badge, award it to someone else.
>>Visit the P2PU Badges site.
>>Create a badge.

Badg.us
badge issuing
Badg.us is an experimental service used to issue badges. Simply upload a badge graphic, plus in the meta info, and link to the url provided. Services include a nifty QR code generator for earners to claim their badges.
>>Visit the badg.us site.
>>View recently created badges.

OpenBadgesUA
badge issuing
OpenBadgesUA is another badge issuing service. Services include displaying information for social media such as Facebook and Twitter.
>>Visit the OpenBadgesUA site.
>>Read more about the OpenBadgeUA Displayers.

Discussion Prompt:
We want to see your progress!

1. Show us your badges!
2. Tell us a bit about your badge making progress.
3. Did you run into any problems or do you have any questions for the group.