Sharing on the OBA
Across the OBA there are a variety of options available to users around how you share and publicise your Open Badges. This short blog aims to look at the options available to both Badge Issuers (Academy Managers) and Badge Earners (Academy Members)
The first point to note though if the difference between sharing your badge and pushing your badges. In short, sharing you badges allows anyone to view a ‘copy’ as it were of you badge on a public social platform — for example this may be a link back to your badge on Twitter or a Post on Facebook that links to your badge. Whereas, pushing your badge means ‘transporting’ it to another platform or environment — typically we see this when users move their badges into the Open Badges Backpack.
Sharing
There are a number of sharing options you can utilise on the Open Badge Academy, and a variety of different places you can share from. Lets cover the different places you can share from first:
- Your Profile Page
2. A badge you have been awarded or earned. This can be done from either your profile page or from the actual badge itself.
3. Finally you can also share from a badge you have found or one that you have created yourself — this we call the ‘Published Badge page’ This is a great way of letting everyone know about your badge programme or scheme by sharing a credential they could earn themselves.
Once you’ve decided where you’d like to share from, you’ve then got a few different options to choose from:
- Facebook — You can share your profile, badges (earned) or badges (found/created) to your timeline
- Twitter — Tweet out to your followers and have them explore your badges
- LinkedIn — This shares your badge or profile to your LinkedIn feed
- Link — Copy the URL of your Profile or Badge and share this wherever you choose
- Email — This opens your email client of choice and sets you up with an email share of your badge/profile
- Embed — this creates a neat little display of your profile or badge that you can add to your own website or blog
Push
The other option users have is to ‘push’ their badges into other platforms. Again this option can be done from two places, either your Earned Badge page, or from the Created Badge page itself.
You then have 3 options to choose from:
- Push to LinkedIn — rather than adding the badge to your public feed, this option allows you to add it to your Certifications panel — we’ve created a handy guide on how to do this here.
- Push to the Backpack — this option allows you to seamlessly export your Open Badges into your Backpack account.
- Download your badge — You can also download a PNG file (that has all of the meta data baked in) of your badge to export into other platforms.
Downloading your badge, also gives you the opportunity to add it into email signatures, or display it on your website or blog.
