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This wiki documents the Edubadges Metadata Model and the APIs of Edubadges, SURF's service for issuing digital credentials (edubadges) in Dutch vocational and higher education (MBO, HBO and WO). It is written for:
- people at institutions who design badges or microcredentials;
- developers who build systems that issue, store or verify edubadges;
- standards specialists who map Edubadges to other models.
Edubadges is based on the international Open Badges 2.1 standard of 1EdTech, which has three building blocks:
- Issuer: who awards the badge.
- BadgeClass: what the badge stands for.
- Assertion: the badge awarded to one person.
Open Badges is a generic, global standard and leaves out the concepts European education uses to make learning comparable, such as ECTS, EQF level and learning outcomes. Edubadges adds those through 17 metadata extensions. Ten were part of the original model. Seven were added later to meet the EU Council Recommendation on micro-credentials (2022), for example form of participation, assessment type, supervision, quality assurance and stackability. The result is a superset of Open Badges: an edubadge is still a valid Open Badge, but it says much more about the education behind it.
The model is maintained by SURF together with a Metadata Steering Group with members from MBO, HBO and WO. It is also evolving: the wiki describes how the same metadata will be expressed in Open Badges 3.0, which is built on W3C Verifiable Credentials. That is the direction of eduCredentials, the planned successor to Edubadges.
| Page | What you will find | Read it if you… |
|---|---|---|
| 1 – Metadata Model Edubadges | Background: purpose of the model, relation to Open Badges, HORA/MORA and HOVI, use in Dutch education, current developments (OB3, microcredentials, DC4EU, eduWallet, eduCredentials) and the Metadata Steering Group. | want to understand why the model exists and where it is heading |
| 2 – Specification Metadata Model Edubadges | The Issuer → BadgeClass → Assertion model, how Open Badges extensions work, and each of the 17 extensions explained with examples. | design badges or need to know what each field means |
| 3 – Technical description of the Edubadges Metadata Model | For each extension, the JSON-LD context, the JSON Schema and an example (version 2), plus conventions and how to migrate v1 data. | implement or validate the extensions in software |
| Edubadges Metadata Model OB3 | How the 17 extensions map onto Open Badges 3.0: native OB3 fields where they exist, one Edubadges OB3 extension for the rest, with the context, the schema and a complete example credential. | work on the move to Open Badges 3.0 / Verifiable Credentials |
| API | The external API that student information systems (SIS) use to award edubadges directly, secured with OpenID Connect. | connect an institution's system to Edubadges |
| Mobile API | Authentication and use of the API for the Edubadges mobile app (authorization code flow, SURFconext configuration). | build or configure the mobile app |
Suggested reading order: start with page 1 for context, then page 2 for the meaning of the metadata. Use page 3 or the OB3 page for implementation. The two API pages are independent of the metadata pages.