longevity of the badge recipient assertion URL (risks of life after Moodle)

longevity of the badge recipient assertion URL (risks of life after Moodle)

by Peter Evans -
Number of replies: 7

Hello,

The assertion underneath  badge is a publicly available page.  If the badge was awarded in Moodle it has an address like:

   https://moodle.org/badges/badge.php?hash=5fd502f859c0588b3d3348aedc2c008d55755376

There is an assertion page for every badge recipient pair. This page needs to exist for as long as people need to show the validity of their badges. 

My questions are:

  • What would an institution need to do if it was to  move away from Moodle at sometime in the future?
  • How would it maintain access to these badge assertion URLs?
  • How are other institutions handling this risk in their badge projects?

Thanks in advance for any assistance,

Peter Evans

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In reply to Peter Evans

Re: longevity of the badge recipient assertion URL (risks of life after Moodle)

by Simon Coggins -

As far as I can see this is a limitation of badges. If you rely on the organisation to verify badges they need an active service running to validate against.

There is some interesting work going on to tie badge validation to the bitcoin blockchain which would allow validation to become decentralised:

http://dmlcentral.net/the-possibilities-of-badges-and-blockchain/

https://learningmachine.newswire.com/news/learning-machine-and-mit-media-lab-release-blockchain-technology-for-11633933

But at this stage the technology is still at the experimental stage.

Simon

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In reply to Simon Coggins

generating the badge assertion page without using an active Moodle server

by Peter Evans -

Thanks Simon.

I'm looking a little less into the future ... the institute that awards the badge still can provide an active service for the assertion BUT they no longer has an active Moodle site

Is there a way to export the data from Moodle  so we can generate the assertion pair (without an active Moodle site) that can validate the badge.

Perhaps the solution is just to commit to running a Moodle server to do nothing other than validate badges.

Peter


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In reply to Peter Evans

Re: generating the badge assertion page without using an active Moodle server

by Richard Oelmann -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers

I'd say the key to your question is 'active Moodle site'

A small rump archive site could be maintained that holds very few activities or users, but maintaining the badges (or other essential archive information). Such a small 'inactive' site with such a small user base should take very little server space/resources or maintenance.

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In reply to Richard Oelmann

Re: generating the badge assertion page without using an active Moodle server

by Peter Evans -

Hi,

It looks like the best and easiest backup plan if we were to move away from Moodle as our main LMS would be to maintain a Moodle server that would just serve the assertion page (and any other legacy content we would been to maintain).

Thanks for input from the Moodle community ... well done

Peter Evans


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In reply to Peter Evans

Re: generating the badge assertion page without using an active Moodle server

by Don Presant -

Hi Peter:

Another option is to use a plugin to a dedicated badge issuing platform such as Open Badge Factory out of Finland.

A strategy like this has other advantages in addition to avoiding "badge rot", such as:

  • avoiding "badge fragmentation": the ability to develop a more centralized, coherent institutional badge strategy vs. course level implementations that can be difficult to maintain and replicate
  • "blended badging": badge in other ways in addition to Moodle (face-to-face, eportfolio, other platforms, etc.)
  • the increased functionality and more ambitious road map that comes from a dedicated platform vs. a module. For example, stacked Milestone badges, increased issuing flexibility, better reporting, etc.
  • simply swapping plugins when you change LMS platforms (assuming your new LMS also has a plugin or you can get one developed)

Your sustainability cost would then be maintaining an account in Open Badge Factory vs. maintaining a rump Moodle server.

Apologies if this seems like an advertisement. There may be other badging platforms that connect to Moodle, but I only know about the Open Badge Factory one.

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In reply to Peter Evans

Re: longevity of the badge recipient assertion URL (risks of life after Moodle)

by Tim Hunt -
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If you look in the mdl_badge_issued table in your Moodle database, you will see that there is a uniquehash column, which corresponds to that bit of the URL.

So, to keep the URL working, you would need to grab the content of that database table. At the same time, you would probably want to also grab a textual summary of the other linked information that Moodle would show about why the badge was awarded.

Then, you could easily make a simple script (in any programming language. If you don't want to use PHP you could use mod_rewrite or similar to get around the .php in the URL) to respond to the URL, and display an appropriate page.


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In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: longevity of the badge recipient assertion URL (risks of life after Moodle)

by Simon Coggins -

The textual summary is the visual representation of the badge, but to have a valid open badge you would also need to respond to the assertion address that's embedded into the badge and checked by backpacks to ensure the badge is valid.

For the url provided above that would be:

https://moodle.org/badges/assertion.php?b=5fd502f859c0588b3d3348aedc2c008d55755376

If you visit that you'll see the information is encoded in a specific format. While I think it would be possible to keep around just the information without a real moodle site, it would certainly be more straightforward to keep the site if that's an option for you.

Simon


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