Frequently Asked Questions
Index
What are Open Badges?
Open Badges is a global standard for “smart” digital credentials that can travel with the people who earn them. They contain linked information, or “metadata” that supports better recognition for learners like you and makes your credentials more portable and meaningful.
As a badge earner, you can collect multiple badges from different issuers across the learning contexts of your life. This can include education, training, work experience, hobbies, volunteering and various other activities and achievements. The badges you earn will help you tell a more complete story of your skills, achievements and interests.
You can share your badges on social media such as LinkedIn or curate them in ePortfolios or skills passports to achieve your goals in employment, professional networking, education or lifelong learning.
Although Open Badges is still a new standard, it is rapidly gaining worldwide popularity. Growing mainstream acceptance will increasingly build public awareness at the community level.
What is CanCred Passport?
CanCred Passport is a free online service where badge earners like you can easily receive, organize and share their Open Badges. The service is free for personal use. CanCred Passport is the default destination for Open Badges issued from its companion platform, CanCred Factory.
CanCred Passport is owned and managed by Learning Agents, an award-winning Canadian educational technology company. CanCred Passport is built on the same technology as Open Badge Passport, which was developed by Discendum, a leading edtech company in Finland.
Open Badge Passport was developed along with Discendum’s Open Badge Factory as part of a project funded in 2014 by Tekes, the Finnish Funding Agency for Innovation. The MacArthur Foundation in the US funded the initiative further in 2015 as part of the Digital Media and Learning (DML) Competition’s “Trust Challenge,” to foster trust in online learning environments. The DML funding resulted in the release of Salava, the Open Badge Passport Community Edition in January 2016.
Why is CanCred Passport free?
Our business model is to charge organizations for subscriptions as badge issuers on our companion service, CanCred Factory . End users do not pay for accounts on CanCred Passport.
Is CanCred Passport just for CanCred Factory badges?
Not at all! You can store Open Badges earned from other systems in your CanCred Passport account, as long as those badges are compatible with the current Open Badge standard.
Can I display badges stored in CanCred Passport on LinkedIn and Twitter?
Yes, you can! CanCred Passport makes it easy for you to share your Open Badges in popular social media, such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook . And, because the Salava code is open source, community developers can develop new sharing tools as new social media services evolve.
Can I use CanCred Passport on my smartphone?
CanCred Passport is mobile friendly - you can take it wherever you go.
Is CanCred Passport based on open source software?
Yes. Both CanCred Passport and Open Badge Passport are built on an open source code base called Salava (“willow” in Finnish). Salava is the Community Edition of Open Badge Passport. Discendum plans to continue the development of Salava as an open source software project together with the global developer community. The code is maintained on the Discendum GitHub repository.
The Salava open source project is an opportunity for users, practitioners and developers to contribute to the further development of the Open Badge Passport vision. The goal of the Salava project is to further develop Passport as a personal and collaborative learning environment where badges can not only be used to build micro-portfolios but also to support online social interaction between badge earners, organizations and communities of practice.
How can I remove my data from CanCred?
CanCred is proud of its industry-leading features that respect the privacy of badge recipients like you. You have full power to delete your badges and all your data from CanCred at any time.
Make sure you mean it, because this data can’t be restored. And, of course, we’d be sorry to see you go.
- On CanCred Passport:
- View your data
- Go to account Settings (top right dropdown)
- Select MY DATA to see all the data held about you on the platform.
- Delete your data
- Select REMOVE ACCOUNT to delete yourself and all your data from the Passport platform
- View your data
- On CanCred Factory:
Issuing organisations needed data such as your email address in order to issue badges to you. If you received your badge from CanCred Factory, here’s how you can view and remove your data:- View your data
- To view your personal data on CanCred Factory, select: Personal Data Request
- Open the link in the email you’ll receive containing the subject line “CanCred Factory: personal data request”
- Delete your data
- Following the link above, examine your data and make a Private data deletion request at the bottom of the page. If you want, you can choose to keep your badges with your identity anonymized, or you can have all your data deleted.
- When you’re satisfied with the details of your request, select the button labeled
[Send deletion request]
- View your data