Simon Coggins

Thanks Laura,

Very useful to see how people are achieving this now.

One area that we really could use feedback on is exactly what sorts of criteria people want to use to issue badges. Some ideas I've come up with:

• Completing an activity or set of several activities
• Completing a course
• Completing a set of courses
• Viewing an activity
• Posting to a forum
• Filling in user profile or tagging items (to encourage participation)
• Discretionary awarding of badges by teacher (e.g to reward certain behaviour)

This will determine if activity/course completion is sufficient or if we need to implement additional ways of issuing badges.

Simon

I imagine that people would probably want to be able to have the badges for course completion, not just activity

This brings up a good point - is an activity module the correct "level" to implement this feature? It might make sense for it to sit outside of courses so that users can receive badges for completing courses, or even for other non-course related activities (filling out user profile, tagging items, etc.).

On the other hand being able to delegate badge creation and assignment to course creators is clearly really important and having it as an activity makes that really easy.

Simon

First off there are a couple of options in relation to the mahara integration:

1. Handle sharing between moodle + mahara via the open badges infrastructure ("badge backpack")
2. Handle sharing between moodle + mahara via the portfolio API

If we choose the first option only then mahara would just be a displayer of all badges - badges received via moodle would be treated the same as any badges received from an external system. This is the easiest to implement but it does mean that users must set up a Mozilla Persona account or equivalent and actively manage their badge backpack.

As for option 2, we haven't fully investigated the portfolio API so I can't really answer your question on if other portfolios would also be supported, but we will be look into it. It depends on if each portfolio type needs its own code to receive the badges, or if we can push the data in a generic way and let each portfolio decide how to handle it.

Simon

Hi Ian,

Excellent point - we'll definitely need to consider the technicalities of getting data in and out.

For getting the badges out, ideally it would be possible to "push" then to your backpack automatically, but there is at least a manual fallback - the badges are PNG image files with all the metadata built into the image so the user could just download their badge and upload it into the backpack.

As for verifying badges received from a moodle site behind a firewall, that's a very good question! I'm in discussions with the open badges folks at the moment so I'll ask them how this situation is handled - I'm sure it's something that must have come up before now.

We hadn't put much thought into how to handle evidence yet - but as you said badges do support it - we'll add a couple of user stories to capture the ideas but it will have a lower priority than getting an initial implementation out there.

Thanks very much, great feedback!

Simon

Agreed that the certificate module functionality needs to continue to be available.

Simon