What are badges?
Badges, also called open badges, are micro-credentials - a form of digital recognition for skills and achievements. They are designed and issued by you, and verified by us.
Once awarded, third parties can check out the validity of the badge, see who issued it, when it was issued, and the criteria used for awarding the badge.
Why use badges?
Badges are a great way to keep learners engaged and motivated. By chunking learning into smaller pieces, and aligning your content and assessment to badges, learners get recognition and reward along the way.
Learners can share their progress and success on the web via online CVs and social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook, or through special online badge collection services. That’s great advertising for you, and great recognition for them.
Our badges comply with the IMS Open Badges 2.0 standard making them shareable across the web.
We love badges so much we've got a whole article with more on why you should use badges for your next class.
How do you add a badge to your course?
Badges are added to a class activation by a manage user at the time it is set up. See How to assign a badge for course completion.
Note: You can only add one badge per course.
How can you change the design of a badge?
Account owners can create bespoke badge designs with their own background image and/or badge icon. This can help you to showcase your brand and increase the relevance of badges for learners.
How do badges get awarded?
Badges can be awards automatically or have it manually awarded by a facilitator.
Auto-awarded badges
Auto-awarded badges are awarded once 100% course progress has been met, or based on a bespoke integration.
To get 100% course progress, a learner needs to view all the pages and complete all the tasks. See How do I complete my course to get 100% progress for more detail.
If you want to create a bespoke integration to set certain criteria that must be met in order for a badge to be auto-awarded, this needs to be set up by an account owner. Such criteria might be:
A learner must visit every page, and
complete 80% of the tasks, and
get a final score of 8/10 correct in the end of course quiz.
Bespoke integrations require the use of the Event Hub and an automation tool. For more information on how to do this see our developer documentation for Assigning badges for course completion.
Facilitator-awarded badges
Facilitators can use their discretion to award a badge even if a learner hasn’t achieved the pre-set criteria for awarding a badge, such as 100% course progress. This is useful if your course requires different badge criteria to the pre-set criteria (for example 60% course completion, plus attendance at a workshop).
Endorsing badges
Badge endorsement is when you publicly state that a learner has satisfactorily completed all the work necessary to achieve the badge.
A learner can request an endorsement for their badge. An endorser (a facilitator or employer for example) will receive the request via email to endorse the learner’s badge.
Check out these articles for more on how learners can request a badge endorsement and how people can provide a badge endorsement.