Dear Parchment Digital Badges Community!
As 2025 comes to a close, we’re taking a moment to pause, reflect, and say something we don’t say often enough: thank you.
Thank you for choosing us as your credentialing partner. Thank you for sharing your feedback, your struggles, and your vision. Also in the power of credentials and why they matter. They should open doors, tell stories, and carry meaning.
When you chose Parchment Digital Badges, you chose more than a tool. You chose a purpose and a partner: to give learners credentials that matter, to help your institution or organization tell a clearer story, and to make achievement visible. This year, we focused on building toward that purpose.
What We Delivered in 2025
Here are some of the biggest shifts we made and why they matter to you.
A New Chapter: Parchment Digital Badges
In 2025, we transitioned from Canvas Credentials to Parchment Digital Badges. While this was purely a branding change this year, it signals a broader vision: a unified credentialing platform where badges, certificates, learner records, and achievements live in one trusted ecosystem. It’s a name change now, and a foundation for what’s next.
Better visibility and transparency
- We introduced the Skills Hub to help you see how badges, skills, and labor market signals intersect, supporting a more strategic, institution-wide credentialing approach.
- Open Badges 3.0 compliance is now available, aligning your credentials with the latest 1EdTech standard. This brings stronger privacy, better portability, and more learner control.
- You can now export issuer, badge class, and award data, enabling deeper insights and better reporting across your programs.
Improved badge and pathway creation
- Manual experience requirements in Pathways let you credential real-world learning without needing a badge for everything, making your pathways more authentic and adaptable.
- Canvas Courses can now be used as Pathway requirements. This closes the loop between progress in LMS and progress on a credential path, while supporting automation and better structure.
- We redesigned the badge and pathway creation experience from the ground up to reduce friction, speed up setup, and support more intentional design work.
Stronger integration with other Instructure products
- Our integration with Canvas Catalog helps learners discover the value of your programs through visible badges and pathways in listings and programs, while also giving your credentials more reach.
- Canvas LTI integrations are more powerful, with better course syncing, view-only roles, and dynamic registration to simplify setup.
More admin control and clarity
- We launched new beta environments, so you can explore and test features before they go live.
- Added tools for bulk award revoking, achievement type management, and clearer issuer navigation, giving admins the control they need to run programs at scale.
Accessibility, usability, and support
- We reached WCAG 2.2 Level AA compliance and updated our VPAT, which is a major step forward for inclusion and accessibility across all learner experiences.
- Updates to alt text for badge images, improved notifications and menus, and upgrades to the Pathway Builder ensure that the platform is more intuitive and welcoming to use.
Why This Matters
You didn’t choose a credentialing tool just to issue badges. You chose one to help learners own their achievement, and demonstrate their outcomes, and to give your institution or oroganization a way to meet evolving learner needs in a changing education and workforce landscape.
When your tools are easier to use, when your data works for you, and when credentials visible and valuable to learners, you’re more prepared to meet the moment. That’s what this year was about.
Help Shape What Comes Next
As we look ahead to 2026, we want to make sure we’re building the right things, for the right reasons, with your input at the center. Help us learn:
- What moved the needle for you this year?
- Where are you still struggling to get the outcomes you want?
- What would make Parchment Digital Badges a more essential part of your strategy, not just a tool you use?
👉 [Take the 2026 Planning Survey]
Your insights will directly shape our priorities for the year ahead. Let’s define the next chapter together.
The Parchment Digital Badges Team
