Our courses get decommissioned regularly and are being replaced with new shells. When a course is deleted the badges wont work anymore. What would be a best approach to handle this so that a badge earned in one year, say grade 9, will be still be available to be verified in say grade 11 or twelve, after the course has already been decommissioned?
Thanks,
Dirk
Hi Dirk,
Not sure if I understand it right, so correct me if you are looking for something else.
If the course is deleted, users won't be able to earn the badges that were in this course. Everything that has already been earned, will remain intact. Earned badges are available to users regardless whether the course has been deleted or not. Such badges can be also accessed and verified by the backpack as well as everyone else in Moodle (if user features them on their profile).
Yuliya
Hello Yuliya,
Thank you for the clarification.
I am attaching a screenshot of what I see when when I click 'Criteria' or 'Issuance Details' in the popup after clicking the badge with the two characters (thumbs up and down). I am also including a live link to the page which may not be available forever. It tells me that the activities are no longer available. The course does not exist anymore also.
Link to page where badge is displayed: https://mahara.rockyview.ab.ca/user/view.php?id=9152
Thanks again.
This is one of the big issues for Badges from an LMS.
Firstly, if you strategry for running Moodle means you wipe users and courses(data) each year, then you lose some of the information on badges.
A badge is not just for a semester, its for life. So you need to have an ongoing strategy.
For example, in 2 years time if someone is to verify that badge - it should still work if it is to have meaning.
So perhaps swap to a yearly moodle site so each year becomes an archive.
2015.mydomain.com for example so the badge/course/students stay working, always..
Or do not issue any public badges through your teaching Moodle at all and use a system outside of your live teaching Moodle that will always exist - for example, if you have a dedicated Moodle site just for issuing badges use the https://moodle.org/plugins/view.php?plugin=block_badgeawarder Badge awarder plugin to mass issue badges in the dedicated badge site so it never gets reset each year.
Of course, there are solutions that can improve how Moodle handles badges
the badge issuiong could be not linked to any live course or user data, just a log of the badge issued, so if they course, or user is gone from system it still can show
this badges "archive" or dataset could be exportable and importable so you can move last years issued badges into the new this years site, or even other systems..
Just some random thoughts on it
Thank you Gavin,
"Firstly, if you strategry for running Moodle means you wipe users and
courses(data) each year, then you lose some of the information on
badges."
We are not wiping users every year. They are in our moodle for at least anywhere between one to twelve years. Courses will get wiped (or hidden) because enrollments and teaching assignments change every year. We are a K-12 district and students move into different levels each year. We don' want a grade 8 student to be fully enrolled in their previous grade 7 courses for example, and it would be desirable if badges achieved in one year would still be fully functional in another year regardless of current course enrollments.
"A badge is not just for a semester, its for life. So you need to have an ongoing strategy."
That is exactly what we are trying to achieve but Moodle seems to not let me the way I would expect it to be. As it is, it seems to be that a student would have to be enrolled in a course for life for the badge to remain fully functional. I would love to be proven wrong on this.
Hi Dirk
I come across something similar recently with a client of mine. They wanted to show users their grades for a particular course, even if they were un-enrolled from the course.
I think a bit like what you are having now with the badges. It turns out that Moodle stores the grades as historical data in the mdl_grade_grades_history table. I wonder if a person could not in this case create a mdl_badge_issued_history table and using an SP move all the data into it.
When a new entry is added to mdl_badge_issued, the SP creates a copy in mdl_badge_issued_history. The create/tweak the existing badges block to look in the new table for the badges.
If this interim fix could work for you, then I would be happy to help work on it.
Thank you Sean.
Yes, I have had those requests also from some of our schools. Our main grades reporting takes place in a SIS but it sure would be nice if a student's entire Moodle grade history was available irrespective of current enrollments.
I will get back yo you on your proposed badge tweak. For now I changed the language string from the default as seen in my screen shot this:
"This student has likely met this badge's criteria
successfully but he or she is not enrolled in this course any more. Badge
reporting is limited at this time."