Pilot report
Piloting of “Sustainable Future Educator” digital open badge constellation was organised in the five partner organisations of EduSTA – Academy for Sustainable Future Educators Teacher Academy in 2024. All partner organisations piloted at least one micro badge. Pilots organised in connection to Initial Teacher Training (ITE) programmes focused on embedding individual badges into existing courses, while the whole badge constellation was offered in pilots organised as part of professional development or as a part of Vocational Teacher Education programme for participants with professional background. The pilots were mostly organized in the local language.
Altogether 276 individuals participated in the pilots. 181 of them earned at least one badge. Total of 575 digital open badges were issued in 2024 in the pilots. This included 23 Sustainable Future Educator meta badges, 201 milestone badges and 351 micro badges.
The pilots demonstrated the applicability of the badge constellation to diverse teacher educational contexts. Both organisers and badge applicants found that the constellation is motivating.
From badge design perspective, the piloted proved that the constellation describes competences, assessment criteria and tasks for demonstrating the competence already in a quite aligned way. Still, needs for alignment, checking possible overlaps and simplifying language were identified during the process. Also, some demonstrations have to be changed as they were prone for the use of AI. These issues are taken into consideration in the revision in spring 2025.
Assessing the success of the piloting
The pilots organized by all EduSTA partners provided a good view on the applicability of the constellation as the pilots ranged from ITE of early education to professional development of VET teachers and academics. The badges proved to be applicable in all these contexts. An important feature of the badges that made this possible is that the demonstration of competence is also related to the present or future working context of the person demonstrating their competence.
The most important needs for refining relate to:
• checking the alignment of competence objectives, assessment criteria and demonstration of competence
• checking some possible overlaps of competence areas
• using plainer language
• making some competence demonstrations more AI proof.
It should be emphasized that these are minor revisions. The badge design teams have started working on the revisions and the refined constellation should be available in spring 2025.
Local pilots
All partner organisations piloted at least one micro badge. Typically, individual badges were piloted when badges were embedded into Initial Teacher Training (ITE) programmes, while the whole badge constellation was offered as part of professional development or as a part of Vocational Teacher Education programme for participants with professional background, but no previous teacher training. The pilots were mostly organized in the local language. The national teams translated the competence objectives, assessment criteria and competence demonstration descriptions to the local languages before piloting could start.
The three Finnish pilots were conducted in the contexts of Professional Teacher Education and Vocational Education and Training. One of the pilots was organized in co-operation with Tredu Vocational College at Tampere as in-service coaching programme, one consisted of individual learning paths with workshops for the teaching staff of Tampere University of Applied Sciences and one was an online course for students in Professional Teacher Education in Tampere University of Applied Sciences.