Learning Technologies Staff Help and Support

Digital badges can be used to celebrate achievement or to show progress. Badges can be awarded to students automatically upon successfully completing a set of activities or meeting certain criteria (eg posting in forums on a weekly basis, completing a quiz, regularly adding blog posts) or they can be awarded manually by a tutor. They can work well as means to give students additional motivation to participate and can work well with activity completion (see the activity completion page for more on this).  Digital badges can also be shared on social media platforms, including LinkedIn. 

In SOL, these badges are displayed on the students profile or in a 'public badges backpack'. 

There are two types of badges: 

1. Site badges
2. Course badges

Course badges would be the most suitable as these are related to the activities that happen inside of a unit.  

Creating and Issuing Badges

Below are some instructions outlining the steps but for help creating and setting up digital badges, don't hesitate to contact ltu@solent.ac.uk. The example below is a badge to encourage regular forum usage.

Before Creating A Badge

Before creating a badge, 'Activity completion' may need to be set up. In the forum user badge example below, 'Activity completion' has been set up on each of the different forums so that students must post once and must also reply to 2 other students in order for the forum task to be considered complete:

How to Create a Badge

STEP 1: From underneath the editing cog, select More >Add a new badge:





STEP 2: Name the badge, give it a description and add an image to be used for the badge:



STEP 3: Click on Create badge (other details eg name, email etc can be added to the badge using the boxes below before clicking Create badge-in the example below these fields have been left blank):

How to Assign Criteria to a Badge and Award It

Once Create badge has been clicked, a screen to assign criteria to the badge is shown (see screenshot below). The steps below outline the process to assign the criteria to the newly created 'Expert Forum User' badge. 

STEP 1: On this screen, in the 'Add badge criteria' box, select Activity completion from the drop-down options:

STEP 2: Scroll down until the tasks to be assigned to the badge are visible and check the boxes next to them (see screenshot below). Then:

• In the 'This criterion is complete when...' section, check the option All of the selected activities are complete>Save:

STEP 3: Click Enable access (see screenshot below). This will make the badge ‘live’ and mean that students can now have the badge automatically awarded if all the badge component tasks have been completed. Once one student has been awarded the badge it will become locked and cannot be revoked so check all the correct tasks have been assigned to the badge (as in the screenshot below) before enabling it.

STEP 4: On the next screen, click Continue if happy with the badge and settings:

The screen below will then appear with a message saying that the badge is currently available to students:

Editing a Badge

If changes need to be made to a badge, click on the Disable access box (see the screenshot above) which then navigates back to an earlier screen where changes can be made by clicking on ‘Edit details’ . 

The screenshot below shows what the Edit details screen looks like. To edit the badge, the steps outlined above will need to be repeated and then click on Enable access again to make the badge 'live' and available to students.

Manage Badges 

All created badges and status can be seen by clicking on the ‘More’ cog from underneath the editing cog wheel and then Manage badges:

A list of any badges that have been created for the module will then appear along with information about availability, the criteria assigned followed by the number of students who have been issued the badge. The final column on the right allows the tutor to disable access, edit, copy or delete the badge.

For more information, see docs.moodle.org - Badges.