Written by: Johnny Bayerl, Associate Product Manager, D2L.
Introduction
Since the original release of Brightspace Awards tool in 2016, D2L has been committed to supporting open digital credentials. This commitment enables learners to take their badges and certificates with them to external platforms that follow 1EdTech’s Open Badges standard.
Mozilla Backpack was one of the first platforms we partnered with, as it aligned with our belief in open, free access to digital credentials. To make the experience seamless, we even introduced an “easy button” that allowed learners to push their Brightspace Awards credentials directly to their Backpack.
A lot has happened since then. The Brightspace Awards tool has gained tons of new capability and is now used to award millions of badges and certificates every year. There have been lots of changes to Backpack as well – it was retired by Mozilla and migrated into the free Badgr platform, then acquired, and has gone through two different rebrandings.
Share to Badgr option disabled in Awards tool in Brightspace
With Instructure’s recent notice of Issuer Creation: Paid Plans Only, our existing connection has been deprecated and there is no longer a free-for-anyone plan available on that platform. To prevent user issues, we have completely disabled and removed the ‘Share to Badgr’ option from Brightspace for all users.
We continue to support other options for sharing your Brightspace Awards to external platforms: an easy-button share to LinkedIn, as a public URL, and as an external badge. The external badge, in particular, is a simple file download with all your award information embedded into it which can be uploaded into platforms that support 1EdTech’s Open Badges standard. Additionally, we have active integrations with partner platforms such as Credly, Accredible, and Open Badge Factory.
Your voice matters
At D2L, we understand that this change may be disruptive to our clients and we want to emphasize that we are partners in this process with you. We will remain open to our community’s requests for connections from Brightspace to platforms which you are interested in, and encourage you to reach out to your Customer Success Manager about our process for that.