Guidance and Support
Resources to help staff and students use Open Digital Badges.
Earners' guidance and support
In simple terms, when you receive a University digital badge, you will receive an email notifying you of your new badge. You either simply download the badge, or you can follow the link in the email to set up a Canvas Credentials account to manage and share your digital badges. The guidance documents for this are downloadable below.
You may also find some FAQs from earners below on this page.
Issuers: Guidance for planning, creating and requesting a new badge
If you are interested in planning and creating a new badge, the best guidance can be found on our Issuers page.
You may also want to have a look at our FAQs from issuers section further down on this page.
Issuers: Guidance for current badge issuers and administrators
Guidance for Champions
FAQs
Here are some of the most frequently asked questions from earners and potential issuers. If you don't find the answer to your question here, please feel free to ask your local Digital Badges Champion or ask the BadgEd team via Helpline.
FAQs from earners
Please visit our catalogue to see the current open digital badges on offer.
We've noticed that occasionally a Canvas Credentials verification email might be sent to a spam folder or blocked somewhere along the email delivery chain, so please check your folder.
If you're trying to add an additional email address to your account, you can trigger a re-send of the verification email as part of the process. Click the Resend code link in the verification code pop-up window when adding an additional email address to your account.
Typically, this means that the badge was awarded to a different email address than the one your Canvas Credentials account was created with.
Contact your issuer (course instructor) to learn if your badge was awarded to a different email than expected. If this is the case, you can add the correct email to your account as a secondary email and try adding your badge again. If the issuer used an incorrect email that doesn't belong to you, you can ask them to reissue the badge to the correct email.
First check our guidance documents for earners (downloadable at the top of this page). Make sure you are sharing your badge in the recommended way.
If you are not actually seeing the pop-up that offers sharing options, check your browser settings. By default, some browsers block pop-ups from automatically showing up on your screen. When a pop-up is blocked, the address bar will be marked 'Pop-up blocked'. You may wish to allow pop-ups from the Canvas Credentials/Badgr website. To do so, please check your browser settings.
If you have done this but still have an issue, please contact IS Helpline for support.
FAQs from potential badge issuers
Essentially, you consider your badge idea using a few guiding questions and then discuss your idea with your local Digital Badges Champion. You might also request a badge development workshop. Once the idea is fully developed, your Champion will guide you through the request process. Your request will be looked at by the Governance team, who will give feedback and suggestion. Once approved, you can set up and start issuing University digital badges.
Issuers page (for potential issuers)
Find the list of Champions on the Champions page
Any University of Edinburgh staff member, school or programme can request to issue University open digital badges.
There is no minimum number of times that we expect you to issue badges. You may create badges that are only issued to one earner, or none at all- there may be cases where you want to create a badge but you are not guaranteed if and when you will issue it, that is absolutely fine.
If you are planning on issuing badges to more than 500 earners, please contact the Service Team at opendigitalbadges@ed.ac.uk to discuss this.
If your School or department has a Learning Technologist, they might be most suitable for performing the Champion role, therefore we suggest having a conversation with them. If your School or department does not have a Learning technologist then we advise discussing internally. If you require additional support or information about badges please log a call with IS Helpline stating your School/ Department.
If you are interested in creating new badges, we recommend discussing this with the relevant authorities within your local School or Department.
Not necessarily. Within the University of Edinburgh, some departments have already been issuing digital badges for several years, which has highlighted the need for a central service.
The Open Digital Badges service aims to:
- create consistency for all users that issue or earn badges
- co-create and share best practice amongst colleagues
- provide support
- create a badge community within the institution
- provide an opportunity for more colleagues to get involved.
Users may continue to issue badges outwith the IS supported service; however we would be keen to discuss.
Help and support
If you have any issues concerning Digital Badges: in the first instance, as an earner contact the issuer, as an issuer contact your Digital Badge Champion. For any other matters, contact the IS Helpline with as much detail possible about your question: