Parchment Award Digital Badges: A New Era in Credentialing

KevinMeredith
Instructure
Instructure
8
3535

Instructure25.png

 

Hello Instructure Community!

In case you missed it, Canvas Credentials is moving to the Parchment Award family, and will be officially Parchment Digital Badges on October 31, 2025!

While today this is only a rebrand, it's an important first step in streamlining our issuing offerings and services, as well as ultimately enhancing your experience with digital badging. 

Digital badging is proving to be more crucial than ever for today’s learners. With 97% of employers already using or considering moving toward a skills-based hiring approach*, equipping learners with opportunities to demonstrate their skills is pivotal to supporting their academic and career goals. 

To help you provide this support to your learners, we envision an end-to-end, holistic credentialing solution that supports every step toward those student goals and their individual learning journeys. This is a crucial first step toward allowing you to more effectively manage enrollments, issue credentials, and maintain student records.

Here, we want to share a little more insight into the Canvas Credentials branding change to Parchment Digital Badges and what you can anticipate in the coming weeks.

What's Changing?

Today this change is purely a re-brand to bring Instructure’s digital badging solution under the trusted Parchment umbrella. This means the only immediate impact to the end-user experience will be naming and branding updates. Users will see some minor changes: 

  • Within the product itself - there will be newly reflected Parchment branding
  • Within the LTI name in Canvas - this will be called “Parchment Badges” 
  • The urls for the product - the new domain will be in each of the following regions: 
    • US/LATAM: <institution domain>.badges.parchment.com
    • AU: <institution domain>.badges.parchment.au
    • CA: <institution domain>.badges.parchment.ca
    • EU: <institution domain>.badges.parchment.edu
    • SG: <institution domain>.badges.parchment.sg
  • Support email - this change is coming and more information will be provided! 

An example of the in-product change can be seen below. As you can see, the changes are strictly branding within the user interface: 

New Parchment Digital Badges Branding on Issuers' Pathways PageNew Parchment Digital Badges Branding on Issuers' Pathways Page

 

 

Why the Change?

Our goal is to help institutions like yours through their issuance of degree and non-degree credentials, allowing institutions to manage these artifacts through a common platform in Parchment. This all serves to support you to better engage, prepare, and assist learners in achieving their academic and career goals.

This first major step, unifying all issuing services and solutions within the Parchment family, will provide you with the ability to more effectively manage enrollments, credential issuance, and student records, all on one platform. 

Equipping your learners with a unified experience to demonstrate their achievements is crucial to provide a holistic look into their capabilities for wherever their learning takes them. 

 

When Will the Changes Take Place?

The in-product change, where Canvas Credentials will officially be rebranded as Parchment Award Digital Badges within the product, will take place on October 31st, 2025. There are also  a series of communications that we are planning over the next few weeks to continue awareness around these changes. Here is where you can follow along: 

 

What Resources Are Available Now? 

While the change is minor, we have created resources that can help you to avoid any disruption to your product experience. 

Please reply with any questions, or feel free to reach out to your customer success manager.

- The Instructure Team

 

*Source: AACSB Insights

8 Comments
PamelaDoherty
Community Member

With the Canvas LTI changing from 'Credentials' to 'Parchment Badges,' do existing badges need to be reconnected to courses? I assume no but wanted to double-check.

 

thanks

VPundir
Community Contributor

Will you continue to offer a free tier of credentials/badges?

VPundir
Community Contributor

Will you make all parchment awards available as badges now?

KevinMeredith
Instructure
Instructure
Author

@PamelaDoherty no, there is no need reconnect badges to courses. Thanks for checking, but that won't be a necessary step here. 

KevinMeredith
Instructure
Instructure
Author

@VPundir  unfortunately, we can no longer support the free tier of Badges. After 12/31 of this year, free issuing capabilities will be fully terminated.

 

Regarding your question of Parchment Awards as badges (if I understand correctly), Parchment Award has multiple issuing offerings under that umbrella. Parchment will continue to offer services for: transcripts, diplomas, certificates, and this change signifies micro-credentials as a fixture of the Award platform. 

GideonWilliams
Community Coach
Community Coach

Is there any chance you could look at badges for K12 and provide a solution that does not require external verification and use of emails?

Having a Badge systems provides amazing opportunities at K12. More meaningful engagement with curriculum, opportunities to develop different models of assessment and recognition of skills across all aspects of learning. 

Its a real shame that limitations are placed on this model because of the instance that students verify their account externally. Surely something could be done with permissions so that students could still use the model but it only be visible within the institution? I would imagine that there would be lots of schools would love to use digital credentialing with pathways and hierarchies, but are prevented to do because of the 13+ age restriction.

The same is true for digital portfolio use at K12, where the default position must be "not visible/shareable outside of the institution" but with a permission option to make available when appropriate. Unfortunately, this is not yet in place.

AramirezHFTP
Community Member

Will Parchment allow for sorting badges by date within the dashboard. If so how does that work. 

AramirezHFTP
Community Member

Also the badges are now showing up in Catalog even when all the connections have been made and sync run.