Background
Badge Nation is committed to recognising what individuals achieve and accomplish outside of formally accredited qualifications, using digital badges to motivate learning and ambition. We are a not-for-profit, purpose driven partnership bringing together all sorts of organisations across industries and sectors, to better champion skills, experience and learning – whatever that might look like. With Badge Nation organisations can easily create their own bespoke badges to acknowledge and reward the achievements of students, volunteers, colleagues and teams. Led by Real Ideas and Future Creators, all badges issued by Badge Nation are written using the Cities of Learning badge standard which is endorsed by City and Guilds and the RSA.
Badge Nation member organisations (Issuers) pay annual membership to gain access to badge writing support, quality assurance and publishing, and Credly – the global badge issuing platform on which all Badge Nation badges are stored.
Objective of Development
This development project is intended to broaden Badge Nation’s functionality and impact over two main strands:
Elevate user experience for Issuers
• provide dynamic, interactive badge writing platform with clear tool tips.
• drive all membership support and related platform access through one site,
reducing confusion and decreasing need to seek additional support and
clarifications, increasing value of membership offer.
• automate support comms to progress members through processes.
• reduce barriers to participation, increasing uptake of membership.
Drastically increase efficiency of internal operations
• reduce manual steps in quality assurance and publishing process by providing
two-way communication with Issuers.
• reduce time spent to deliver membership support by use of integrations with third
party platforms i.e. Credly.
• maximise profitability of membership offer.
Systems and Associated Platforms
WordPress – Members Area
Our members area, which provides a portal for access to badging resources, is built on WordPress. Whilst we currently use a Google form and Google sheets to accept and quality assure badge writing applications, we would like this process to be built into the members area, negating the need to use Google’s suite and provide a fluid, consistent, user-friendly experience. We communicate back and forth by email throughout the badge writing process. This support would need to exist within the platform, as part of the steps in writing a badge, and allow for 2-way correspondence, in the form of comments, between our team and the members writing the badge.
As our web app is already established, you will need knowledge and experience of:
• WordPress – custom theme development
• Bedrock – a WordPress boilerplate for modern development tools
• Composer – PHP dependency manager
• OpenAPIs – Knowledge and experience using OpenAPIs, to integrate with badge issuing platforms using the Open Badge Standard.
• Proficient in HTML, SCSS, Javascript, PHP, Git, CICD processes.
Badge Issuing Platforms – Credly / Badgr
Credly and Badgr are third-party badge issuing platforms where we manually publish and issue digital badges. We would require integration with APIs to add new badges by sending badge metadata, whilst automating the steps of issuing badges to the badge writers.
https://www.credly.com/docs/web_service_api
https://support.badgr.com/en/knowledge/badgr-app-developers-api-guide2
Find out more about this opportunity via the Badge Nation Platform Development Brief.
If you have any questions or need further information, please do not hesitate to get in touch with Ruby Barter, Programme Coordinator, via email ruby.barter@realideas.org. If this process presents any barriers to you or any reasons why other responses to this call would be more appropriate for you to submit, then please get in touch and we will be open to discussion.
Once you have read the brief, please submit your proposal via email before Tuesday 14th June 2022.
Subject:
BN Development Proposal
Recipients:
Ruby Barter Ruby.Barter@realideas.org
Lee Dyer Lee.Dyer@realideas.org