Inter-American Development Bank Digital Credential Framework

Today, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) launched the IDB Digital Credential Framework, with the support of Learning Agents.

The Framework is a strategic reference that aims to streamline the creation, issuance, and management of open badges in the professional and educational communities while ensuring high-quality metadata.

• Unifying Approach: The Framework provides a cohesive guide for IDB and its partners to ensure standardized badge development, validation, and issuance across the open recognition landscape, incorporating rich metadata for enhanced discoverability and trustworthiness.
• Fostering Collaborations: By supporting partnerships and collaborations within the region and globally, our Framework seeks to uphold interoperability with the external credentialing ecosystem, creating a comprehensive and inclusive learning environment.
• Empowering Lifelong Learning: The Framework promotes learner empowerment and self-directed learning, transforming badge earners into active, autonomous lifelong learners who leverage digital credentials to connect and learn within communities.
  Adapted from the IDB announcement on LinkedIn.

Learning Agents collaborated with the IDB team to develop the comprehensive reference framework, which was based on paradigms of practice developed through IDB’s large scale experience with badges across badging platforms and extensive desk research into other digital badge and micro-credential initiatives, standards and principles for adult learning and international development and the policies ad strategic plans of the Bank (see References in the Framework). The Framework cites a Comparative Matrix of Reference Frameworks and Standards, drawn from the desk research, prioritized for IDB’s context. (Learning Agents continues to use this reference frameowrk for ongoing work, in addition to the IDB Framework itself, which has been published with a Creative Commons CC BY licence.)

The current version of the living framework includes:

• A Manifesto, or statement or principles values and goals
• A flexible Taxonomy of badges across a spectrum of formality and prupose (see below)
• Guidance for key characteristics, such as:
  • Verifiability and integrity
  • Transparency and clarity
  • Relevance and alignment
  • Learning experience and activities
  • Intended outcomes, assessment and evidence
  • Notional learning effort
  • Levels of learning and skill
  • Quality Assurance
  • Endorsement
  • Stacking
  • Recognition of prior and external learning
• Critical Information Summaries by Badge Type