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How to: use badges in Moodle 

Introduction to badges

• Badges are used in many types of courses and modules. We use them a lot in NOOCs and courses related to compliance. A badge can be issued for completion of one or more activities. Normally we use a badge per unit, with perhaps one for the introductory activity (to increase motivation to continue) and there may be special badges (e.g., for students who carry out extra tasks such as contributing a lot or mentoring others).

There are two reasons to include badges.

1. The acquisition of badges helps you easily work out who has completed units and thus the whole course, to assess entitlement to credit.
2. In Moodle, students can see their badges on their profile. The idea is that badges can motivate students to take part in activities and complete units. Badges can also be exported to external sites such as Mozilla Backpack or LinkedIn to add to an online CV.

What are badges? See the blog post “The Whats and Whys of Open Badges“

How to add a badge to your Moodle module

First Create a badge (i.e. the graphic you will use as the badge)

You can use any graphics program or go to  https://www.openbadges.me/designer.html. The graphic should include some word or phrase that explains what it is: e.g., “Resource collector” or “Sustainability Week 1”. I often start mine with an icon such as a Castle, for Nottingham, or a computer symbol.  Icons Etc is a useful place to find icons http://icons.mysitemyway.com/

Second – add it to your module

• In your module enable completion tracking.
  http://workspace.nottingham.ac.uk/display/Moodlehelp/How+to+use+completion+tracking+to+monitor+student+progress
• Make sure you have at least one resource set up with some completion tracking.
• Now from the Administration menu (Module administration) click Badges > Add a new badge
• Give the badge a name and a description (include a summary of the badge criteria here)  
• Upload the badge image you designed and saved earlier
• Check the issuer details are correct (University of Nottingham Moodle)
• Enter a badge expiry date if needed or leave on Never  if no expiry is needed.
• Click “Create Badge”

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• Now you must choose your badge criteria (in other words, what does the student have to complete in order to earn the badge)

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• You can set the badge to be awarded manually – i.e. you can award it to whichever students you judge to have earned it – or on module completion - OR set Activity completion (likely to be most common)
• Choose “Activity Completion” and on the next page select the activity or activities that have completion checking enabled in your course.  If no activities have completion checking enabled then you won’t be able to progress.

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• Click Save
• Once this is done, you need to “Enable Access”.  This activates the badge and it is ready for use.

You have now enabled an Open Badge. Whenever a  user completes the activity or activities you picked they will be redirected to the badge where they can download a copy of it. It is also attached to their Moodle profile.

Badge winners can also “Push” the badge to their Mozilla Backpack, which is an external tool that stores all open badges and can be used to demonstrate the badges gained.

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