Key takeaways:
- Elevate My eQuals Badges – seamlessly extend your institution’s My eQuals Badges functionality with Credentialate to add deeper meaning, context, and evidence to every digital badge.
- The Power of the Personal Evidence Record (PER) – Transform badges into dynamic, verifiable portfolios by linking them to a PER, which showcases specific skills (aligned to standards like openRSD), assessments, and artefacts, providing irrefutable proof of achievement.
- Enhanced Industry Relevance & Insights – utilise Credentialate’s integration with external frameworks and rich analytics to ensure badges articulate skills that resonate with employment needs, provide granular insights into learner attainment, and support data-driven program improvement.
Digital Badges can be powerful – are you making the most of them? Since 2017, all Australian and New Zealand universities and a growing number of tertiary education institutions have leveraged My eQuals for secure verified official academic credential document issuance. Increasingly, those institutions are expanding greater learner credential recognition through the robust National Microcredential Framework compliant My eQuals Badges functionality.
With a strong established position of full credential recognition and comprehensive official learner profile records through My eQuals, there are further capabilities to enrich the power of extended skills recognition and the depth of connection between education and employment that sits behind the badge. My eQuals has partnered with Edalex to enable access to institutions utilising My eQuals Badges to realise these extended premium digital badge capabilities.
As an Australian company, Edalex has helped educational institutions across ANZ connect learning, skills and evidence for more than 9 years. We’re long-standing contributors to the My eQuals Microcredentials and Badges Working Group, and active participants in the broader skills recognition community. Our Credentialate platform is designed to transform how institutions create, manage, and showcase learner achievements. We’re excited about how Credentialate seamlessly extends your existing My eQuals badging, to showcase greater skill articulation to Australia and New Zealand’s official tertiary credential platform.
Amplifying Badges: What Credentialate Brings to My eQuals Badges
The extended value of a digital credential can often come from the rich context and evidence it provides. This is where Credentialate steps in, accentuating open badges into powerful, evidence-backed statements of achievement:
- The Personal Evidence Record – this is Credentialate’s game-changer. Credentialate generates a dynamic, verifiable Personal Evidence Record for each credential, for each learner. This record clearly states specific skills (linked to standardised skill descriptors), assessments, and artefacts, providing irrefutable proof of achievement. This evidence link is then securely embedded within the issued badge in My eQuals.
- Sophisticated badge creation and management – My eQuals Badges empowers you to design visually rich and data-driven digital badges. Credentialate extends those badges through seamless integration with external frameworks, including openRSD – the world’s largest open library of human- and machine-readable Rich Skill Descriptors (RSDs). RSDs provide additional context and meaning for badge recipients and viewers, to ensure each badge further articulates what a learner has accomplished and how it relates to employment and industry needs. Groups of badges can be categorised in ways that make sense to your organisation, whether that be by department or type of skills (e.g. durable skills). Categorisations help you quickly sort and find, and feed in to reporting analytics.
- Deep insights and reporting – gain unprecedented visibility into your badging programs with Credentialate’s robust analytics and reporting tools. Credentialate’s insights go beyond surface metrics – they reveal the rich, underlying mapping that connects learners, courses, learning outcomes, assessments, recognised skills, frameworks, and RSDs. Visual reports track badge issuance and learner attainment through score distributions (including not achieved status), achievement breakdowns, and time-based trends. They also expose how competencies align with credentials and frameworks, offering a clear view of the complex relationships that underpin each badge. This level of transparency supports rigorous program review, continuous improvement, and evidence-based decision-making across departments or the entire institution.
- Automated and scalable workflows – automate your credentialing process. With native integration for leading LMSes, Credentialate can automatically apply your business logic to identify learners to recognise with digital badges. By securely leveraging assessment data across one or more subjects, Credentialate automates performance-based recognition, consistently and at scale.
- Enhanced context for your learners – together, My eQuals and Credentialate provide your learners with enhanced digital badges that extend powerful portfolios of verified skills and achievements, easily shareable and understood by employers and other institutions.
How Credentialate Works with Your My eQuals Badges
The seamless integration between My eQuals Badges and Credentialate provides a premium extension of your credentialing capabilities. With My eQuals as the secure official recognition of credentials and microcredentials, Credentialate can assist in supplementing a further enriched badging experience:
- Configure My eQuals as a badge agent – within Credentialate, your administrators can easily connect your My eQuals account as a badge agent, and your LMS as a data source. This setup enables the seamless flow of information between the platforms.
- Design your evidence-rich credentials in Credentialate – you define the skills, frameworks, and assessment data that will underpin your digital badges. Credentialate then crafts the Personal Evidence Record that brings these achievements to life.
- Link to My eQuals badge configurations – when setting up a new credential for awarding in Credentialate, you’ll be able to search for and select the corresponding badge configuration that exists within your My eQuals system.
- Automated issuance with enhanced evidence – driven by learner activity and attainment within your LMS, Credentialate notifies My eQuals Badges to issue the credential, embedding the unique, verifiable link to the rich Personal Evidence Record generated by Credentialate.
- Track and analyse – use Credentialate’s dashboards to monitor the impact of your My eQuals Badges, gaining insights into learners’ skills and the effectiveness of your programs.
This powerful combination means that when a learner views their badge in My eQuals, clicking on the associated evidence link will take them directly to their detailed Personal Evidence Record, showcasing the depth of their achievement in a way a simple badge alone cannot. All delivered via the global 1EdTech Open Badges standard, ensuring portability, security and learner agency.
Free Self-Paced Guide
HOW TO RECOGNISE SKILLS IN YOUR CURRICULUM
Access step-by-step instructions, explanations and templates. Submit your work to see how you can recognise skills in your curriculum
The Power of the Personal Evidence Record (PER)
The Personal Evidence Record is more than just a link; it’s the rich narrative behind every credential. It allows institutions to:
- Showcase specific skills – detail the exact skills and competencies achieved, moving beyond generic titles.
- Provide contextual evidence – link directly to relevant assessments, projects, or learning activities that demonstrate mastery.
- Offer granular detail – break down complex achievements into measurable skills components, providing a comprehensive view.
- Enhance verifiability – provide a secure, dynamic, and verifiable record that truly proves what a learner knows and can do.
You can explore the power of our Personal Evidence Records here.
Unlock Deeper Value for Your Digital Credentials
We believe that providing verifiable, evidence-rich digital recognition for all forms of learning is essential in today’s rapidly evolving educational landscape. By integrating the advanced capabilities of Credentialate as the Preferred Provider for the trusted and powerful My eQuals national network solution, institutions can enrich their comprehensive credentialing ecosystem.
Through our partnership with HES and Parchment, an Instructure company, Credentialate is now available as a premium add-on service to My eQuals Badges. Investing in Credentialate extends your My eQuals badging capabilities, empowering you to maximise the value of the Digital Badges issued, for both your institution and your learners.
To discuss how Credentialate can empower your institution’s digital badging initiatives, Learn More or Contact Us for a personalised consultation.
Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to refine this powerful collaboration, bringing even greater value to institutions and their learners.
FAQs
How does Credentialate enhance My eQuals Badges?
Credentialate acts as a premium extension for My eQuals Badges, enriching them with greater skill articulation and deeper connections between education and employment. It enables features like the Personal Evidence Record, sophisticated badge design with framework integration (e.g., openRSD), advanced analytics, and automated workflows, all while My eQuals continues to provide secure official credential recognition.
What is the Personal Evidence Record (PER)?
The Personal Evidence Record (PER) is Credentialate’s key innovation. It’s a dynamic, verifiable digital record generated for each credential, detailing specific skills (linked to standardised descriptors like openRSDs), assessments, and artefacts. This PER is securely embedded within the issued badge in My eQuals, providing clear, irrefutable proof of achievement for learners and employers.
How does Credentialate help align skills with industry needs?
Credentialate integrates with external frameworks, including openRSD, the world’s largest open library of human- and machine-readable Rich Skill Descriptors. This integration allows institutions to align skills and competencies to industry standards, providing additional context and meaning to badges that directly addresses employment and industry needs.
What kind of insights can I gain from Credentialate’s reporting?
Credentialate’s robust analytics provide unprecedented visibility into your badging programs. Reports reveal rich, underlying mappings connecting learners, courses, learning outcomes, assessments, recognised skills, and frameworks. You can track badge issuance, learner attainment (including not achieved status), achievement breakdowns, time-based trends, and how competencies align with credentials and frameworks for comprehensive program review and decision-making.
Is Credentialate included with My eQuals Badges?
Credentialate is available as a premium add-on service to My eQuals Badges. Through My eQuals’ Preferred Provider relationship with Edalex, institutions using My eQuals Badges can access these extended capabilities by investing in Credentialate to maximise the value of their digital badges.
