Badges on Moodle!

Since I first wrote about digital badges back in June, I've had badges on my to-do list. Moodle now has integrated badges, so it's possible to assign badges to students for just about any reason. I finally got around to playing with Moodle badges this weekend, and though I'm sure I have a lot to learn about creating and assigning badges, I did manage to assign my first badge.

Moodle allows instructors to assign course badges to students, either manually or automatically based on the completion of activities. For my first badge, I chose to create a badge that students will receive when they successfully log into Moodle for the first time. (This is actually a pretty big task for our students, because some of them really struggle with their intial MyLane log-ins, creation of pass phrases, etc. In addition, the way we assign CRNs in our department is a little different, and while students usually get populated into the correct Moodle classes, sometimes they need to self-enroll.)

I created my first badge by feel and a good dose of trial-and-error. There is a "Badges" link under Settings in Moodle now, with options to manage badges or add a new badge. Since I was starting from scratch, I chose to add a badge. Adding a badge is as simple as giving your badge a title, entering a description of how students earn the badge, uploading an image for the badge, entering issuer name and contact info, and then setting the expiration date ("never" is the default).

This all seemed pretty straightforward, but I wanted more information about creating badges elsewhere (on a site such as Credly, for example) and then importing them or connecting them to Moodle. I spent some time searching through Moodle Docs, but I never really found the information I was looking for. (Generally, I find Moodle Docs to be less than satisfying - I find the explanatory information to be little more than what I can figure out myself by playing with Moodle features, and following its links to track down information is like wandering through a maze.) I found some forum posts that implied that you could import badges made on other sites, but I never found instructions on how to do anything more than use an image of a badge. So, that's what I did. I copied the image of a badge that I created in Credly, and pasted that into Moodle.

Once I had added my badge, I was given a prompt to make the badge available and manually issue it to students. This was easy - I simply selected eligible students from a list. From there, I did a little searching around and figured out that to make the badge visible on the Course homepage, I needed to add a "My Latest Badges" block to my course page.

Sooo...I think that I successfully added a badge to my Moodle page. If it really is that easy, I'll be adding more badges soon. Still on my to-do list will be to do a little more research outside Moodle Docs and figure out the connections between Moodle badges and all of the other badge creation and collection sites. I'd like to figure out not only how to import badges from other sites, but how students can take their badges with them. There's always more to learn...