Almost everyone who comes to digital badges starts with the same questions. What is a badge, really? How is it different from a certificate? And how do you run a programme that people actually use? We've launched Certify Academy to answer them in one free, self-paced course. The first pathway, Digital Badge Practitioner, takes about 3.5 hours, and you earn a verifiable Certify badge for every module you pass.
What is Certify Academy?
Certify Academy is Certify's free online learning site for anyone who wants to understand, design or run a digital badge programme. It is open to everyone, not only Certify customers, and runs in English at academy.certify.one and in Brazilian Portuguese at academy.certify.com.br. Courses are self-paced, and you sign in with a link sent to your email, so there is no password to remember.
A digital badge is an online record of an achievement that carries information about who issued it, what the person did to earn it and when, and that anyone can check. The Academy teaches how that works in practice, and it does so using the same kind of badges it teaches about.
What does the Digital Badge Practitioner pathway cover?
The Digital Badge Practitioner pathway has three modules and a final project: foundations, programme design, and launching and growing a programme. Each module combines short readings of seven or eight minutes with one practical task, and ends with a quiz. Modules open in order, so each one builds on the last.
Module 1: Digital badge foundations. What a badge is and isn't, what sits inside one (issuer, criteria, evidence and expiry), and how badges compare with certificates and micro-credentials. It also explains the two standards behind most badges today: Open Badges, the open standard maintained by 1EdTech, and the W3C Verifiable Credentials standard. The practical asks you to inspect and verify a real badge.
Module 2: Designing a badge programme. Choosing where badges work best, writing criteria people trust and choosing evidence, designing levels, stacking and pathways, and settling names, visuals and governance. The practical is designing a badge for your own organisation.
Module 3: Launching and growing your programme. Issuing workflows (manual, bulk, from an LMS, at events and through an API), getting learners to accept and share their badges, and measuring acceptance, shares and verifications. It also covers privacy and data protection under UK GDPR and Brazil's LGPD, with the ICO's UK GDPR guidance as the UK reference point. The practical is a one-page launch plan.
Final project: your badge programme proposal. A 45-minute task that pulls the three practicals together into a proposal you can take to colleagues or decision-makers.
How long does it take, and how is it assessed?
The whole pathway takes about 3.5 hours across 16 steps, and you can stop and pick up where you left off at any point. Each module ends with a quiz that opens once you submit the practical task. The quiz shows you where you went wrong, and you can retake it as often as you like.
The practicals are deliberately close to real work. By the end you will have verified a live badge, designed one for your organisation, drafted a launch plan and written a programme proposal. If you are planning a badge programme, those are the documents you would need to produce anyway.
What do you earn?
You earn a Certify badge for every module you pass, and a certificate when you complete the whole pathway. Both are verifiable, so anyone you share them with, such as an employer or a client, can check that they are genuine. You can add them to your LinkedIn profile and share them wherever you like.
Earning the badges is part of the learning. You receive, share and verify a badge as a recipient, which is exactly the experience your own learners will have when you launch.
Who is Certify Academy for?
Certify Academy is for anyone who is new to digital badges, about to launch a programme, or has inherited one and wants to run it better. That includes L&D and HR teams, training providers and awarding bodies, membership and association teams, universities and colleges, and public sector programme leads. You don't need a Certify account or a technical background.
If your organisation already issues badges, the pathway is also a quick way to bring new colleagues up to speed. Module 3 on acceptance and sharing is where most existing programmes find something to fix.
Why did Certify build the Academy?
We built Certify Academy because the same questions come up at the start of every badge programme, and they deserve a proper answer rather than a sales call. Most of what the course covers applies to any badge programme, and it is the grounding we would want every organisation to have before it issues its first badge.
It also keeps us honest. Every credential the Academy issues is a Certify badge, so the learner experience we describe in the course is one we have to deliver ourselves. If you want the thinking behind Module 2 in article form, our guide to building a high-quality digital credentialing programme is a good companion read.
Start learning
The Digital Badge Practitioner pathway is open now. Start learning free at Certify Academy, and earn your first badge in Module 1. When you're ready to issue badges to your own learners, Certify's badge pathways let you build the same structure of module badges leading to a final certificate.
