Consider Badging for Community Building

Are you thinking about badging for your unit, organization, or community of practice?

• To support aspects and activities within your your community.
• Improve engagement.
• Promote roles and identity within the community.
• Recognize and reward contributions.
• Acknowledge achievements and accomplishments.
• Incentivize behaviors

Consider the following questions as you begin to strategize the role of badges might play:

1. What do you hope to achieve with your digital badge/badges?
2. What need or gap might they fill?
3. What value do they add to your organization?
4. What value do they add to the individual badge recipient, or to the consumers of your badges that are earned by individuals?

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Types of Badges

Digital Badges are a mechanism that can be used in creative and innovative ways to recognize competency, identify roles and contributions, reward effort, and incentivize behaviors.

SUNY Online Teaching Badges by Category

Below is an example of types of badges in their respective categories issued by SUNY Online Teaching:

Examples of SUNY Online Teaching Badge Collections:

• Awards and Recognitions
• Online Teaching Community Contributions
  • Community Participants
  • Community Engagement
  • Community Leaders
• SUNY Online Fellows
  • SUNY Online Teaching Fellow Roles
  • The SUNY Online Teaching community of Practice by SUNY Online Teaching Fellow Roles across the system.
• Professional Development and Competency
  • OSCQR badges

Learn more about how SUNY Online Teaching has created an award-winning badging ecosystem to certify expertise and roles, recognize and reward community contributions and engagement, and certify competency.

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Badge Design

Canva – sign up for free badge templates and ideas

• Example Badge Template
• SUNY Online Teaching badge designed from that template.
• Search Canva for badge templates.

You must be signed into Canva. Click on All Filters to customize and define your search. 

Free Badge Design Generators

• Accredible Digital Badge Designer
• DesignEvo

Designing a Badging System

• How To Design a Digital Badge Strategy
• Best practices in badge design
• Design consideration in badge design

Suggestion: design badges simply in 600×600 pixel jpg or png formats.

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Badge Issuing

• Credly platform
• SUNY Online Badges in Credly.
• To issue badges via Credly, you will need have an account and a badge to issue.
  • You can issue an individual badge, or small numbers of badges manually from each badge page directly by simply filling out the form.
  • To issue large numbers of badges, or to issue various badges in larger numbers:
    • Download the Credly CSV Excel spreadsheet template to fill out and issue badges in bulk.

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If you want to talk about how badging is approached by SUNY Online Teaching, or to strategize about how you might adapt some of our approaches or leverage badging for your own community of practice, let me know 🙂