MOOC badges

I set up the badging system in the ‘Our Green City’ MOOC. This included developing and implementing the criteria for triggering digital badges on Blackboard’s ‘Open Education’ platform and providing guidance for users on how to earn and publish badges.

I created the interactive image below in ThingLink to help the MOOC partcipants understand what badges were available, how to earn them and how to publish them to a Mozilla Backpack.

The greatest challenge in setting up the badges (requiring dozens of support messages, screenshots and lots of patience!) was trying to get Blackboard to fix the bugs in their Achievement tool, so that badges appeared legible and could be published to a Backpack without throwing an error.

The Achievements tool in Open Education relies on Blackboard’s ‘Adaptive Release’ system to trigger badges, which is quite a cumbersome tool to work with. For example, there is no way to make it automatically issue badge ‘Z’ once a user has earned badges ‘A’, ‘B’ and ‘C’. This also makes it more cumbersome for end users to claim badges.

We were let down badly by Blackboard at a crucial stage in the Our Green City MOOC. We had planned to use badges earnt as the critera for awarding certificates of participation but when the Achievements tool failed and Blackboard were unable to fix the issue we were left with no way of knowing who to award certificates to. This was a reminder not to rely on the big VLE providers when it comes to anything at all innovative or new. Blackboard’s code is not open source so even if we had been able to identify the cause of the problem we would have been unable to fix the problem ourselves, having to rely on Blackboard’s support workers who seemed to have virtually no experience of the badging system at all and took weeks to respond.

Badges on Cambridge Learn

I have also used digital open badges in my freelance work creating the cambridgelearn.com LMS.

I designed a set of badge images (with the help of Credly) and set up the system to award badges using a variety of free plugins and paid for add-ons.

Working with badges in WordPress was a far easier process than in Blackboard and the functionality allowed me to issue badges for logging in, changing a user profile, finishing a section of the course, passing a quiz etc.

The image below shows some of the badges available on Cambridge Learn.

The image below shows badges earned listed in the user’s profile page.

The image below shows a badge being edited in the WordPress admin area.