Learning today happens everywhere, but it's often difficult to get recognition for skills and achievements gained outside of formal education and training contexts. Mozilla's Open Badges project is working to solve this problem, making it easy for any organization or learning community to issue, earn, and display badges across the web.

The "Moodle as Issuer, Mahara as Displayer" project integrates Mozilla's new free and open source "Open Badges" software to issue, manage, and display digital badges for learning across the Web. All new software will be released as open source to Moodle, an open source learning management system, and Mahara an open source eportfolio system used in K12 and higher education.

The Open Badges functionality will also be integrated into TotaraLMS, the corporate distribution of Moodle. Richard Wyles, CEO of Totara says, "We're very excited to be undertaking this project as it aligns so well with our open source ethos and goals to deliver core infrastructure for the demands of 21st-century learning. Schools, not-for-profits, higher education, workplace, and corporate training - all areas of learning can benefit from this initiative."

In addition to the collaboration with Open Badges, Totra LMS has also announced a new partnership with Lambda Solutions, who now provides a full range of services for the open source Moodle Learning Management System and Totara LMS.

Shevy Levy, CEO of Lambda Solutions, comments on their new partnership with Totara LMS, "Totara, a version of Moodle that has been enhanced with functionality for corporate training and development, provides an out-of-the-box implementation that addresses specific needs of HR and Training Managers. We are therefore excited to partner with Totara and offer these extended capabilities to our customers."