Embedding badge criteria and evidence

Embedding badge criteria and evidence

by christa appleton -
Number of replies: 10

Hi I know you can say what a Moodle badge is for in the description but it seems to me that some areas that really should be editable and allow more detail about what a badge is for are missing. Unless its me? The attached image illustrates where I mean.

Currently I think these badges are ok for reward/motivation but to be really worth earning and showing to others they need all the relevant metadata embedded in the badge (as recommended by Mozzilla) this does not seem to happen currently in Moodle. Fields are set up for criteria and evidence but then left blank, see attachment. Any thoughts anyone?

Christa

Attachment moodle badge criteria and evidence.png
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In reply to christa appleton

Re: Embedding badge criteria and evidence

by Randy Thornton -
Picture of Documentation writers

Those fields are not blank. Those are the criteria and the evidence.The criteria for your badge is that it was awarded manually by someone in one of those roles. That's the criteria that was set when the badge was created. The evidence is basically saying the criteria was fulfilled.

It sounds like to me what you want is to have a description of what you think the criteria means or signifies: "This badge was awarded because the student demonstrated the ability to do xxx." Right now, it is just states what activity (or whatever criteria you set) was completed. It's programmatic, not descriptive. It would be nice to have an ability to annotate those specifically though. Or even connect them to other things like outcomes.

But for now: when someone looks a badge out in the world in a backpack, they see the description, but the criteria and evidence are just links. So it is actually better to put your own explanation of the badge in the description.

 

Attachment screenshot_502.png
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In reply to Randy Thornton

Re: Embedding badge criteria and evidence

by Simon Coggins -

Randy is spot on with his description. I do agree it would be nice to be able to provide a text description for those fields when setting up the badge, especially for manual award critiera because otherwise the criteria is just who issued you the badge, not why.

Would you be able to open a ticket in the tracker (tracker.moodle.org) and we can take a look?

Simon

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In reply to Randy Thornton

Re: Embedding badge criteria and evidence

by christa appleton -

Thanks Randy

I'm new to badges and I am struggling to see the logic of those fields as they stand. My concern is that Moodle badges may not be credible enough. You are right about what I'd want to see, it is more like your badge illustration, particularly the links to the criteria for the badge, that makes sense.

Simon

Im glad you see what Im getting at and support the idea smile I'll have a look at the tracker...

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In reply to christa appleton

Re: Embedding badge criteria and evidence

by Yuliya Bozhko -

Hi Christa,

Badges made in Moodle are completely Mozilla OBI compliant. We embed the information that is required to issue a badge based on Mozilla Assertion specifications.

Currently, criteria and evidence are picked up by the system automatically and are not very user specific (they don't contain user details, or details of what user have have done). They are printed as generic information on the badge page. If you have only one criterion for a badge, it will match the evidence information. If you have multiple criteria joined by the rule that any of them have to be completed to earn the badge, then badge page will print only the ones that user has actually completed to earn this badge.

There are plans to let badge recipients add some badge evidence information from their portfolio. But it most likely will be done in the future Mahara ePortfolio part of this project. At the moment, if we want to print more information, we need to decide what kind of information we want to show (is it course grade, assignment submitted by a user, activity grade, outcomes ,...?). Also don't forget about visibility around all these items. Badge pages are completely public, we are showing them to everyone. So, everyone will be able to partly see the contents of the courses, or other information that they won't necessarily have access to otherwise.

I can imagine adding an option to attach files or write some comments to an issued badge. But the idea of the badges is to be automatically generated, so that teachers don't have to go an issue each badge manually. In this case, I doubt a teacher will go and attach user relevant information to each issued badge if they have 200 students in a course who complate all badge criteria. Another problem is, who is allowed to add this information? If badge is issued based on some criteria, there is no really a person who awarded the badge.

These are just some thoughts and any more ideas are always welcome smile

Yuliya

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In reply to Yuliya Bozhko

Re: Embedding badge criteria and evidence

by christa appleton -

HI Yuliya

thanks for the information, perhaps it is down to badge expectations. I don't expect the badge to contain user details but more about the criteria behind the badge seems important to me (see reply to Randy). 

Perhaps ideally the badges to be issued are agreed across a whole school/curriculum area, badges that are set up could then have the appropriate criteria embedded already when the badge is issued and everyone knows where they are and what they can issue badges for. Officially agreed badges can then be said to being awarded by the learning provider via the school/faculty and issued by the teacher.

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In reply to christa appleton

Re: Embedding badge criteria and evidence

by Randy Thornton -
Picture of Documentation writers

Christa,

I think this would be a good feature to have, as Simon says, and if you make a Tracker issue, I'll definitely vote it up smile

Credibility is a key issue. From following the discussions in the Mozilla OpenBadges community group, it seems a lot of people would like to see (or are trying to build) something to mark a badge as "institutionally approved" vs "teacher issued" and/or "official" vs. "casual."  So they want to be able to align badges with existing institutional credibility, but still allow more informal uses than certificates and grades have.

Right now, Moodle badges are teacher created and issued with no real indicator of institutional or other status for a badge. So it is hard to judge as an outsider how much "weight" to grant to an awarded badge.

Maybe if badges just had categories, so an admin could mark them with some sort of standard verbiage such as Approved, Provisional, Discretionary, or whatever; akin to having your own custom grades scales or outcomes.

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In reply to christa appleton

Re: Embedding badge criteria and evidence

by Elizabeth Dalton -

I agree with Christa's concern. We've just issued badges for the first time (for a conference attendance) and we immediately got questions about the criteria and evidence fields. I understand that the contents of these fields are in compliance with Mozilla Open Badges, but the wording here is confusing.

The "Criteria" section says "Users are awarded this badge when they complete the following requirement," but the requirement just says the badge has to be issued by a user with the specified role. The Criteria text sets the expectation that the criteria for the authorized user awarding the badge will be given.

The "Evidence" section has the same problem. It states, "This badge was issued for completing:", but then duplicates the statement about the role required to issue the badge.

Possibly it's a wording problem, or just the way the information is presented. If the "Description" was listed below the criteria, it would be easier to understand how the pieces fit together.

It seems to me that when the badge is awarded manually by role like this, the criteria intended for the badge ought to be listed as part of the badge, and a checkbox should allow the issuer to affirm that the recipient has met the criteria. Then these criteria could be included as part of the badge.

Additionally, a way to include a URL or text entry for "Evidence" would help make that part of the badge metadata more useful. For example, if I award a badge for attending a conference, it would be nice to be able to include a link to the conference URL, and/or a list of attendees, so someone wanting to check the evidence could see that yes, the recipient of the badge is listed in the conference directory.

Meanwhile, I'll probably have to figure out how to reissue the badges I just sent out two days ago so I can make the description specific enough to give viewers (and even recipients) a clue as to what they're about.

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In reply to Elizabeth Dalton

Re: Embedding badge criteria and evidence

by William Beazley -

All,

I confronted this issue when I approached the Texas State Board of Professional Engineers about accepting badges for continuing education. They rejected them, mostly, because there were too many moving parts for them to audit them.  I even prepared a draft policy but I fear, it confused them more.

I've generalized the policy and posted it here as a public service:

http://pipingdesignu.com/?page_id=187

The first finding was that badges do not carry all of the information need by TSPE for auditing the CE.  For example, there is no indication of "contact hours", credit hours, or equivalent metric of time. The PE must then translate this metric to Professional Development Hours according the scheme published by TSPE in the PE's "Log".  This interpretation is what the ePortfolio will have to do.

There is other data needed as well.  I am going to handle this in the "description" section of the badge.  It's my understanding that there is work underway to add badge "extensions" but that's all I know about it.

Another issue is that moodle cannot use quiz completion directly as evidence because it is possible to complete a quiz but fail it. (I'm really not clear on what moodle does here.)  I used another activity, certificate, to be viewed to get their badge, then set the visibility dependent of a quiz grade. Clumsy, but it works. 

Finally, it is NOT my policy to disclose grades and, gladly, badges do not. (They are on the certificates, which it is up to the learner to send on.)  What I will do is publish a policy on issuing badges that requires students to score 80% on a quiz covering all objectives to get a badge. That plus the quiz (which I will NOT disclose) will serve as my criterion but I will also have to place that in another location as well.

I've seen a lot of crappy badges that would never pass muster with a licensing body.  It's up to the issuer to exercise discipline in their badges until these features are automated.

I need to get this feature into production, so I can't wait for all the bells and whistles to be in place.  Just having it will be a plus.  I think badges will be a killer app someday, particularly for Continuing Ed in licensing.

Bill Beazley

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In reply to Elizabeth Dalton

Re: Embedding badge criteria and evidence

by Elizabeth Dalton -

What I ended up doing was making the badge dependent on completion of the "Attendance" activity: http://docs.moodle.org/25/en/Attendance_module

The resulting badge criteria look like this:

badge criteria - attendance

The badge description has been modified to include a URL to the event website, which provides more detail about the time spent and activities included. It's a bare URL, rather than a link, because this is a plain text field, rather than HTML formatted text. A summary of the event is also included in the Description field:

badge description

I don't normally feel that attendance or seat time are good criteria for badges, but I was asked by our administration to construct this badge and issue it based on these criteria. I would prefer to issue badges based on evidence of competency. But badges are, by design, non-prescriptive in their use and criteria, so badges based on attendance are likely to be fairly common. Given that, it seems that using something like the "attendance" module in Moodle provides the clearest and most accurate explanation of the criteria used to issue the badge.

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In reply to Elizabeth Dalton

Re: Embedding badge criteria and evidence

by William Beazley -

Elizabeth,

I, too, used the description to add data needed for Continuing Education by the Texas Board of Professional Engineers. I can't wait on whether TSPE will decide to accept badges or not because I have to get into production.  I did, however, learn what data elements they will need in the future and started adding them directly into the badge description. For example, here is a badge description I just put into a badge:


-----
Someone with these skills can:

Identify and describe the role of the major types of contractual parties to a process plant design 
Describe the interchange of requirements between a client and a contractor 
Describe how design decisions further constrain project requirements.
CONTINUING EDUCATION DATA
COURSE DURATION: 1 Contact Hour
INSTRUCTOR: William G Beazley, PhD
TYPE OF ACTIVITY: Online course (Video, Notes, Quiz, Extras)
SPONSORING ORGANIZATION: Piping Design U

---

The topmost stuff are the objectives demonstrated by taking the test.  The additional CE data I've added is required to satisfy the requirements of TSPE although they make no guarantees they will accept them. The rest of their requirements are already met in the current badge structure. A PE would still have to keep a log interpreting the information in their PDH units.  I plan to issue a few more badges then pay them a visit in Austin to explain what I am doing.

Bill
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