BCTG Construct Accreditation
City of Glasgow College, Scotland
Digital Badges
BCTG Construct is a consortium of educators, industrialists, and designers who aim to transform the way that construction-based training programmes are delivered in the UK by providing accredited online learning courses.
The goal of the best practice was to have the BCTG Construct online learning courses https://bctgconstruct.co.uk/resource/e-learning-platform/ accredited to allow participants who used the platform to evidence their Continuous Professional Development (CPD) achievements.
The technology that was used is a platform called Badgr https://info.badgr.com/, this was the preferred platform as it is a free open software which is widely used for accrediting online learning courses. The project team explored a number of different accreditations and the outcome was that digital badges were very modern and offered a future proofed solution. As many other online learning courses use badgr, this allowed the learner to collect a range of different badges to add to their portable learner record.
Having the BCTG online learning courses accredited, using digital badges, added value for learners and the project. Having each learning outcome accredited helped recruit users, as it motivated the participants to complete each course, knowing that there was accreditation offered at the end.
A tip would be to consider accreditation from the beginning and think about the different options, which include digital and traditional accreditations. Avoid leaving it to the end of the project, as this can result in the process being rushed and there can be difficulties around integration into your platform.
The resources required for this project were the online accreditation software ‘Badgr’ and a web developer, who was responsible for integrating the accreditation tool into the online learning hub.