[Translation : EPALE France]

A lot has been said about Open Badges. EPALE expert David Lopez met Sébastien Mauras in Chinon to ask him about how he uses this tool, to bring life and development to an area.

David Lopez: Sébastien, can you tell us about your role and what you do?

Sébastien Mauras: I’m the coordinator of Bloc², a skills centre in Chinon, Indre-et-Loire. I work in this position as an employee of the Ligue de l’Enseignement 37, which is part of the consortium behind the project (CNAM, GRETA, Ligue de l’Enseignement). 

Bloc² is a structure whose governance is shared by popular education associations and local associations, training bodies, public stakeholders, employer bodies, social and integration structures, skills providers, residents and users. It offers a space dedicated to skills development. 

It’s a collaborative place to meet, work and experiment, featuring a community café, technical equipment, a learning lab, a Fab Lab, a community garden and coworking spaces. All this fosters shared projects, multimodal training courses, workshops, practice spaces and experimentation areas to help people acquire and develop skills, and so much more! 

It’s a place where you can develop your skills and have them recognised, receive training and build your professional future, a resource centre and a true ‘central hub' dedicated to skills. 

David Lopez: Sébastien, how do you work with Open Badges, concretely? What methodology do you use? And which groups do you work with?

Sébastien Mauras: Open Badges are becoming an important part of the Bloc² project. They are a tool for recognising what we call ‘informal’ experience (which is not recognised by a contract or diploma). This may include community or volunteer work, personal values, activities, services and skills developed in a non-professional or non-academic field.

It’s a way of demonstrating your soft skills and cross-disciplinary, transferable abilities, and above all, highlighting people’s strengths and talents. 

The skills centre is open to everyone, and Open Badges are a perfect example of Bloc²’s desire to build community. They are a tool for building self-esteem and reassuring people about the skills they have acquired and developed in all areas of life. The Open Badges system is a way to reveal skills that are important to employers. I’m only talking about a few ways of looking at skills here; there are many others. 

The idea is to use Bloc², as a group of partners and an identified physical location, to develop a network for the explicit recognition and use of Open Badges, and above all to bring activity and life to this network. It is important to support these dynamics, both in terms of people’s ability to recognise their own skills (helping them to verbalise their skills, which is undoubtedly the most important part of the process), and in terms of organising badge workshops for the network, so that Open Badges can continue to be used in a concrete way and the skills centre can be a permanent source of support for all users. 

David Lopez: We sometimes hear criticism of Open Badges. They are seen as a gimmick with little recognition from employers or social partners. What do you think? 

Sébastien Mauras: I think that, as with any new step forward, there will always be critics. It’s actually interesting to listen to them. The idea is to come up with a tool that can be useful to everyone. So it's good to hear the more negative views. 

Personally, I can testify to the usefulness of Open Badges in a wide variety of situations. For a network to be relevant and useful in practical terms, it seems to me that it needs to be set up in a defined area. This is the case for what we are developing in the Chinon region. 

We are talking about catchment areas (hubs that attract residents on a daily basis) on which the network of recognition must be based. We make sure that all stakeholders are involved in the network: social and integration structures, community partners, local residents (working people, jobseekers, volunteers, retired people, the young and the not-so-young – all sections of the population) as well as employers, public bodies and institutions. 

For a network to work, everyone needs to take part and each person needs to be able to find their own way of using Open Badges (there are many different entry points and purposes for this). 

David Lopez: What does the future hold for Open Badges? What are the challenges and difficulties? 

Sébastien Mauras: At our level, the future is to continue to lead and grow this network of open recognition in the Chinon area and, who knows, maybe even more widely in the future. 

Every day we see new possibilities, and new projects and partners enrich our common project. It's important for us to continue to involve as many people and structures as possible in this collective dynamic, to enable it to develop and create links across the region. 

As I said, Open Badges are one of the ways in which we can help everyone to develop their skills. The aim of this system is not to supplant anything that already exists. 

One of the challenges is to ensure that all of the existing schemes and tools work together, to increase the number of initiatives that can be mobilised when thinking about and building your career plan, so that each person and structure can achieve their full potential in fulfilling their goals. 

In a nutshell, the aim is to keep working together to explain, develop and boost the network of open recognition, using Open Badges, as concretely as possible in the Chinon area. 

I would like to add that on 21 December 2023, the Ligue de l’Enseignement took an active part in the national Open Badges conference at the Economic, Social and Environmental Committee in Paris. This was an opportunity to publicly present the "Open Badges White Paper". It sets out the challenges and recommendations for deploying Open Badges in France.

https://leplusimportant.org/documents/2023/12/livre-blanc-badges-numerique.pdf

Contact details for Sébastien Mauras: smauras@fol37.org 

www.leblocchinon.fr

David Lopez, EPALE France expert.