BADGES FOR (LIFELONG) LEARNING - GAMIFICATION, ENHANCED VISIBILITY OF REACHED ACHIEVEMENTS AND CONTINUOUS BUILDING OF E-PORTFOLIO AS DATA SOURCE FOR LEARNING ANALYTICS

The lifetime of skills and particular knowledge is getting shorter. In parallel, the new skills are obtained as a part of the lifelong learning process. Only a part of these processes is actually recognized and even fixed in a form of degrees, certificates and references. The diversity of both personal learning environments and situations when you have to present yourself in a specific way (e.g. to the potential employer or group of friends) demands the flexible and transparent system that enables continuous building of e-portfolio of reached achievements and learning goals. The huge potential in this field is presented by the Open Badge Infrastructure created by The Mozilla Foundation. This infrastructure supports so-called "badges" granted from any issuer to anybody in the form of a digital picture. Such a file is the independent digital object with encoded information about parameters of reached achievement, issuer, earner etc. Integration of such a tool into the existing content management systems (CMS), learning management systems (LMS), e-portfolio systems, (digital) social networks, online service providers including games and also intranets could lead to the unique distributed personal learning analytics data source. This paper describes briefly the current status of implementation and also risks, threats and weaknesses of such an infrastructure.