The Organisation

Anspear is a technology and educational publishing company. Their mobile learning technology powers teacher training programmes, TA development, distance learning degrees and bespoke learning programmes. school staff development programmes, teacher training and curriculum learning. Anspear’s partners use Anspear Learn to deliver distance learning degrees, vocational training and much more. They help teachers across the United Kingdom access flexible, easy to access and affordable learning.

Anspear’s platform is set apart by its mobile-optimised design, consistent, interactive experience and wide range of automatically marked assessments. It also offers powerful usage analytics to help teachers, tutors and managers measure the impact of their learning programmes.

Challenges

With their previous digital badge provider, Anspear was frustrated by the pricing model and lack of customisation and support. They also felt that the experience for recipients was too complicated. define the challenges.

Anspear wanted to provide more visible, digital badges and certificates for teachers and trainees, as well as increase their brand visibility through social sharing. Having a fully automated digital badge platform that is seamlessly integrated with their existing technology stack via Certify’s API, was also a top priority.

“Getting any customer support from our previous provider was a challenge, let alone custom development work or bespoke pricing models. And although their credentials were easy to issue and administer, the recipient experience was uninspiring.”
– Charlie Pearson, Anspear

The Solution

After selecting Certify as their Digital Badge provider, Anspear were easily able to build all the necessary automations via API to securely issue digital badges and have them made available to recipients inside their mobile learning app within a matter of days.

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Anspear also successfully migrated more than 40,000 existing badge recipients from their old digital badge provider to Certify.

“We chose Certify for several reasons, one of which was the API documentation. We looked at Open Badges and Credly, but Certify had a straightforward API and a responsive team. When building an integration, having a human to help at the other end makes all the difference. There was also an opportunity to work with them to extend the API to suit our needs, which was extremely valuable.made the integration process seamless. Our development team was able to read the API documentation and get the integration done without any back and forth that would have easily taken weeks.”
- Charlie Pearson, Anspear.

The robust credential dashboard that Certify provides also gives Certify staff the ability to track the number of credentials issued and can easily troubleshoot whenever needed to ensure their learners have their achievements to share with the world on social media.

Results

Anspear has been able to achieve a 50% open rate which, for an industry where digital badge adoption has been slower than others, is impressive. Anspear expects to issue at least 100,000 digital badges over the next 12 months and to see an increase in open rates and engagement as recipient awareness increases.

Anspear’s courses are now firmly embedded in many in-school teacher training courses and its trainees are earning hundreds of credentials every day. The badges help keep them motivated and the PDF certificates are really important evidence in their training profile. 

“As time goes by, we constantly find new features that Certify adds to their platform that make creation, issuing and management of our badges and certificates even easier. Customer support is exceptional, Certify are always on hand to help us with any changes or issues that we have”
– Charlie Pearson, Anspear.