The Badge Nation story
Badge Nation is a community of organisations formed to encourage, track, share, recognise, reward and motivate learning and ambition – all via digital badges. Through Badge Nation you can easily create your own specific badges for your own students, colleagues, or teams.
We are all built to learn. Yet, outside of formal education and certified qualifications, there is little to credibly validate the activity, the experiences. Therefore, we have created Badge Nation. We exist to help organisations recognise individuals for their learning and achievements. Working together we make it easy for you to reward and badge-up success, helping you drive motivation, confidence, and dedication to continual learning amongst your participants, learners, volunteers, placements, and trainees.
Badge Nation was born out of an innovative and ambitious pilot project led by the RSA called Cities of Learning. The project sought to use digital badges and the Cities of Learning Pathway tool to link and make visible the eco-systems of learning that exist in a place and the opportunities that learning could lead to. The project was funded by City and Guilds and UFI and was led in Plymouth and Brighton by our two founding member organisations; Real Ideas and Future Creators.
The pilot saw the Cities of Learning Badge standard applied to the writing of digital badges for the first time. This provided the confidence our issuers needed to talk about rigour and quality assurance in the world of digital badges. It went a long way to giving what had previously been a very open and inconsistent world, a framework and structure. It remains to be a central mainstay of the Badge nation approach to digital badges.