Finnish Vocational Teachers’ Competences Made Visible by Open Badges

Abstract

After the reform of Finland’s vocational education and training sector, there arose a need to focus on vocational teachers’ new competences. A national project called “Teachers’ Open Badges” explored these competences as instruments of recognition. The open badge-driven learning process was designed for Research, Development & Innovation (RDI) competence development in teacher education programs. The results revealed that student teachers found open badges useful for demonstrating competence for job application purposes. They attached earned open badges to their ePortfolios and shared their badges in other digital environments.