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