Pathways are a means for people to explore their way through different badging experiences to find new opportunities or realize new futures. The destination of two travelers is not necessarily born from the same pathway. A pathway may have multiple routes to the same endpoint; have multiple entry points to achieve similar outcomes; or outcomes may diverge based on the path taken.

Personal interests, accomplishments, family, friends and various life activities all shape who we are, the interactions we have and how we learn. Those are the customizing features that make us who we are as individuals and influence the paths we follow or choose. Just as your high school classmates, a cohort of medical students or a soccer club may intersect on a path, each person customizes their own destination and means of arriving there.

Prescriptive pathways seek to declare one homogenized, standard or recommended badge earning path. Typically these approaches rely on a form, structure and recommended path laid by institutions, governments, private companies or other formalized education plans. This badge pathway will likely be linear — a straight line from one learning experience to another.

Descriptive pathways seek to acknowledge the ways people consciously and willfully choose to earn badges. A descriptive pathway is a more natural approach for a badge recipient since s/he’s defining his/her own path. When there’s no prescribed pathway, people find the way that makes sense to them, choose to follow other people’s paths or strike out in very different directions.

Until recently, most pathways have focused on prescriptive, institutional or corporate learning objectives/achievements, ignoring the successful learning from unstructured environments such as book clubs, volunteer activities and other extracurricular interests. Badges are a means to recognize those opportunities and incorporate their benefits into creating an accurate digital portrayal of accomplishments.

Pathway complexities vary depending on the individual's career goals, personal interests and experiences. Some pathways may be short, while others may be lifelong. Pathway structure takes on many forms and badging for these pathways may be simple, linear or complexly interconnected. Those active in the Open Badges space have organized their thinking into competing pathway taxonomies. For example, in 2014, the Open Badges Discovery project identified four possible structures for pathways (linear, freeform, tiered and clustered).

Carla Casilli's badge system design research provided another set https://wiki.mozilla.org/Badges/bsd/wiki of defined learning pathways with an alternate set of four structures:

• Simple — badges are only related because they come from the same issuer (e.g., a university)
• Linearly connected — one badge leads to another (e.g., beginner, intermediate, advanced)
• Complexly interconnected or non-linearly connected — badges cross categories and don’t follow a linear pathway (e.g., attendance award, pharmaceutical training)
• Complex cross-system linking — badges are connected to badges from other issuer’s systems (e.g., university CS degree, Microsoft programming certification, Cisco data security credential)

While both of these schools of thought on pathway structure may be a useful lens into how to think about organizing badge systems, it's important to note the field is evolving and rapidly being defined as new issuers, earners and recipients enter the arena.

Theoretically, pathway structure concepts are well accepted; however, operationalizing them into an applied application can be a challenge. Canvas Credentials implementation of pathway structure is based on a hierarchically organized set of steps. Completing each micro-step can be thought of as the pieces that form a pathway to the parent objective(s).

The Canvas Credentials pathway structure is not overly complex, making it accessible to many use cases while providing enough structure to offer a common way to think about badge system design, including defining the achievement of an individual or organization's learning goals.

The graphic below depicts the pathways Canvas Credentials employs to support badge earners. You can see the nested structure of steps in it, modeling real-world relationships between concepts that people understand as categories or containers full of smaller component ideas. Looking at Pathway B, you can see three levels of steps, where some have a badge associated and others have only child pathway steps. A badge may be shared between multiple pathways published by the same issuer.

When integrating a badge system, it's important to think about your badges as a whole. How will you implement them? What kind of badges are you awarding? How often will you award badges? Are badge earners allowed to test out of specific steps, demonstrate relevant competencies or bring in badges earned from other issuers? Rather than plodding through the creation of each badge, one by one, how might you organize them in a meaningful way for the recipient and consumer? For pathway design, identification of purpose, structure and achievement are critical no matter if you are starting from scratch or badge mapping an existing system.

One of the biggest considerations when designing pathways is the distinction between (a) integrating badges into an existing curriculum and (b) creating a badge system and a curriculum at the same time.

"When badges are being added to a pre-existing curriculum, the curriculum may constrain the way learning is recognized. For example, if an existing curriculum is not aligned to standards, it is very difficult to align a badge to standards. Alternatively, when the curriculum is being developed alongside badges, the options for both may seem limitless and overwhelming. A pre-existing curriculum can importantly help to structure design decisions. There are specific advantages for either approach." —source:

If the thought of designing badges and learning pathways seems overwhelming, there are resources and experts that can help. Canvas Credentials is a fully open-source platform for awarding badges. It can be integrated with many other platforms (e.g. LMS, CRM) or developed as a custom stand-alone app. We've been involved in setting badge standards and are part of the thought-leadership in the emerging concept of learning pathways mapping and standards. We can support your efforts every step of the way, from creating your badge and learning pathway system to simply providing some gentle nudges to steer you in the right direction.