Open Badges 3.0 and Verifiable Credentials: What Changed This Term

Open Badges 3.0 turns a course badge from a picture with a link into a signed record the learner owns. This term, the US organisations that shape how learning is recorded started building around that idea: a new national coalition for portable learning records, and fresh certifications for the standards that carry them. Federal policy, though, still hasn’t named the standard. For anyone who issues certificates, the format question is getting easier to answer. The question of what a badge proves is not.

What happened

Three developments since the start of October show where things stand.

Sixteen national organisations formed a coalition for portable records. On 20 October 2026, the Learning Mobility Coalition launched as “a cross-sector effort to make learning records more portable, trusted, and useful” (AACRAO, 2026). Its members include 1EdTech (the standards body behind Open Badges), the American Council on Education, EDUCAUSE, UPCEA, NACE and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation. It succeeds the LER Accelerator, which began in 2023 to promote interoperable learning and employment records (LERs: records of what someone has learned and done that can travel between colleges, employers and job systems). Its four priorities include helping institutions create and use interoperable records, developing shared standards and tools so records can move between systems, and linking those records to state talent marketplaces. The announcement doesn’t name a technical standard.

A platform used in 42 states certified for the new standards. On 27 October 2026, SchooLinks, a US K-12 college and career readiness platform, announced 1EdTech certification for Open Badges 3.0 and the Comprehensive Learner Record (CLR) 2.0, a standard for bundling many achievements into one verifiable record (1EdTech CLR 2.0; SchooLinks, 2026). Students keep their achievements in a digital credential wallet as “tamper-proof, machine-readable credentials”, with continued free access to their data after graduation. The company says millions of students in 42 states use its platform. It joins credentialing providers that moved earlier: Accredible, for example, added export and import of Open Badges 3.0 and W3C Verifiable Credentials in January (Accredible, 2026).

Federal policy describes the idea but not the standard. A white paper published on 2 October 2026 by Greg DiDonato of EBSCOed mapped US federal policy on digital wallets, LERs and credential registries through 2026 (DiDonato, 2026). It lists a run of Labor and Education guidance encouraging states to fund LERs and talent marketplaces, including a July 2026 Labor letter it summarises as describing “verifiable, learner-controlled records built on open standards such as W3C Verifiable Credentials”. But its conclusion on the badge standards is blunt: “No federal document reviewed cites Open Badges 3.0 or the Comprehensive Learner Record 2.0.” The one federal badging programme it lists, the Department of the Air Force’s, issues badges under Open Badges 2.0. This is one author’s review, written by someone whose company sells into the sector, so we’d read it as a useful map rather than the last word.

What Open Badges 3.0 changes

The standard itself isn’t new: 1EdTech’s current version, document 1.4.5, was issued on 29 June 2026 (1EdTech, 2026). What it changes matters more as systems like the ones above start to rely on it.

• Every badge is a verifiable credential. The specification puts it in one line: “an Assertion is also a Verifiable Credential (VC)”. A verifiable credential is a W3C format for records that are signed by the issuer and tamper-evident.
• The proof travels with the badge. Hosting badge data on the issuer’s server has been the preferred method of many Open Badges issuers, and the specification notes that “Hosted badge data is also not tamper-evident.” A 3.0 badge carries its own proof, so it can be checked after it moves platforms.
• The learner holds it. 3.0 badges are “designed to be issued and offered to learners who may accept them into their digital wallet”, rather than living only on the issuer’s site.
• It isn’t backwards compatible. The specification says 3.0 badges “will not be conformant to all of the existing 2.x data model requirements”, which is why platforms have to upgrade and get certified rather than flip a switch.

Why it matters for people who build courses

If your course ends in a certificate, the record of that certificate is moving out of your platform and into the learner’s hands. A PDF or a badge image on a course page is easy to copy and hard to check. A signed credential in a wallet can be checked by an employer, a college or a job system without contacting you, and it keeps working if you change platforms.

That’s good for learners, but it raises the stakes on what you put inside the badge. A verifiable credential makes its contents easy to read and easy to trust as untampered. If the contents say “completed 12 videos”, that’s what an employer will see, verified.

What the evidence says

The research on credentials is thinner than the research on how people learn, and none of it tests Open Badges 3.0 directly. The most useful review we’ve found is Soovendran Varadarajan and colleagues’ analysis of 60 studies on microcredentials in higher education, published between 2015 and 2022 (Varadarajan et al., 2023). Verification is one of the things institutions can offer:

But verification wasn’t employers’ main worry. Consistency was:

By comparison, 22 per cent of the studies raised the lack of formal recognition, and 38 per cent raised integrity and the risk of fraudulent credentials. That is the gap Open Badges 3.0 closes and the gap it leaves open. A signature deals with fraud: it proves who issued a badge and that nobody has changed it. It says nothing about whether two badges with the same name required the same work. We’d read this as moderate evidence that employers care most about what a credential means, and that verification helps only once that’s clear. Our piece on microcredentials in higher education covers the evidence on what makes a credential visible to employers.

What we’d do

1. Write the criteria before choosing the format. An Open Badge carries a description of the achievement and its criteria. Write them in the same observable terms as your learning objectives: “can build a cash-flow forecast for a small business”, not “completed Module 6”.
2. Award it for assessed work. Tie the badge to a project, scenario or graded assignment rather than to watching every lesson. The assessment section of our online course design checklist shows how to line it up with the objectives.
3. Check certification, not marketing. If you use a credentialing service, look for it in 1EdTech’s list of products certified for Open Badges 3.0. Ask whether learners can export their badges to a wallet of their choice and keep them if you stop paying for the service.
4. Know what your course platform issues. None of the four platforms we cover (Thinkific, LearnWorlds, Teachable and Kajabi) issues Open Badges natively. Several have built-in gamification badges or completion certificates, but those don’t meet the 1EdTech Open Badges standard: they can’t travel with the learner or be verified from their own metadata. All four can issue Open Badges through a third-party credentialing service such as Accredible, Credly or Canvas Badges (formerly Badgr). If you go that way, check the service’s 1EdTech certification for version 3.0, not just 2.0.
5. Don’t rush a migration for its own sake. If you already issue Open Badges 2.0 through a provider that is upgrading, the move to 3.0 should come through that provider. The bigger gain is usually in the criteria and the assessment, not the file format.

At Avondale University, we issue Open Badges for the completion of our short courses and microcredentials. Apart from sharing those badges on LinkedIn and on resumes, the primary utility of the badges in our ecosystem is the stackability of our courses, particularly in the new MBA program, where professionals have a flexible pathway to build towards a full degree. Academic credit for successfully completed and assessed microcredentials is granted under Standard 1.2 of the Higher Education Standards Framework, which requires assessment of prior learning to be consistent with the credit policy in the Australian Qualifications Framework, and under the AQF Qualifications Pathways Policy itself. Clause 2.1.10 of that policy uses 50% as the basis for negotiating credit from an Advanced Diploma or Associate Degree into a 3-year bachelor (37.5% into a 4-year one): a starting point for agreements between institutions, not a ceiling or an entitlement. The maximum credit limit is set by each institution’s policy, and TEQSA’s guidance asks that credit be consistent with the pathways policy, not disadvantage the student and maintain the integrity of the course.

What to watch next

Watch whether the Learning Mobility Coalition settles on named standards for the records it wants to move, and whether federal guidance starts to cite Open Badges 3.0 and CLR 2.0 rather than describing verifiable records in general terms. Until then, design your badge as if an employer will open it and read every line, because the technology is making that easier every term. For more on what learners are doing alongside courses like these, see what changed in AI in eLearning this term.