Prerequisites: You need to be an org admin or a badge manager to add and edit badges.
Badges can be awarded to learners for meeting various criteria in the learning platform (LXP). These badges can then be viewed on their profiles.
Adding a badge
Go to Admin > Settings > Badges.
Press ADD BADGE.
Give your badge a name and a description and click Submit.
Configuring how a badge is awarded
You specify when a badge should be awarded by using paths and criteria.
Criteria are the individual rules that dictate whether a learner has earned a badge. Paths are collections of criteria. In a path, learners must meet all the criteria in order to earn the badge. Paths mean you can create complex requirements for a learner to earn a badge and that you can give learners multiple ways of achieving the same badge.
I.e. learners can earn the badge by fulfilling all of the criteria in Path 1 or Path 2; they don’t have to do both to achieve the Badge.
Click NEW CRITERIA to start.
There are two types of criteria: Completions and Achievements.
Completions
Completion is the act of finishing a learning experience, a level, or a badge.
| Learning Experience: Completing an LX is a straightforward task – either finish the single object or finish the required levels (if Undertake an online course) and you get the badge. Once you've selected this, start typing to select the learning experience you want your learners to complete. |
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| Level: You can issue a badge for completing a single level of a particular LX or a certain combination of levels. This is especially useful in non-linear LXs; for example, giving out badges for finishing specific levels can be a better award than trying to get someone to complete an entire LX (especially when that isn't necessary). Once you've selected this, start typing to select the level you want your learners to complete. |
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| Badge: Completing a badge is a neat way of ‘nesting’ badges within badges. You could make the criteria for the ‘Gold’ Badge to be to complete the ‘Silver’ and the ‘Bronze’ badges, as well as doing some other activities. Once you've selected this, use the dropdown below to select the badge you want your learners to complete. |
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Achievements
Achieve is our generic term for having earned a certain level of experience. It is possible to achieve 50 comments or achieve 10 upvotes for your contributions.
Use the number drop-down to select how many times the learner needs to perform the action:
Use the drop-down beneath to select the action you want learners to perform:
You can specify where this action must be performed by using the in: and where tagged fields to select learning experiences and tags, but you don't have to.
You can add as many paths and criteria to a badge as you like.
Customising how a badge is displayed
To add your image to your badge, click Select file and locate the image you want to use. Images should be 500x500px. Click SAVE when you're done.
Next to the image, you'll see the Show in User Profile section:
| Always: Shows the badge in a learner's profile whether they've started it, completed it, or have done nothing towards earning it. |
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| When 'In Progress' or 'Complete': If a learner has partially met the criteria or has earned the badge, it will appear on their profile. |
A badge that a learner has partially met the criteria for, showing an "In Progress" status on a learner's profile. |
| When 'Complete': The badge will only display on a learner's profile once it's been earned. |
A badge that's been completed, showing the completed date, on a learner's profile. |
| Never: The badge will never appear on a learner's profile. | This could be useful if you want to use the badge to trigger an xAPI statement rather than display an achievement to the learner. See below to learn about using badges to send xAPI statements. |
Activating your badge
Once you've set up your badge, you need to make it "live" so that learners can see and earn the badge. Under Badge Status select Live and click Save. To make any changes to it, you will first have to put it back into Edit mode.
Examples
For many folks, the most obvious badge to start with is:
| Your First Comment: Make one comment in any learning experience. |
Badges like this encourage people to use the learning platform's social features, helping to build a learning community that shares information and debates topics. You don't need to stop with the first comment either, you can introduce different levels of the same criteria. E.g.:
| Chatterbox: Make 30 comments across the learning platform. |
Badges that reward people for actions like commenting or contributing tend to count across the whole of the learning platform. Next, you could create badges for specific actions in specific LXs. For example:
| Data Specialist: Complete Data Specialist 2020, Data Specialist 2021, or Data Specialist 2022. |
There's one criteria that lets you award a badge based on popular opinion:
| Popular person: Receive 5 upvotes on your comments across the learning platform. | |
| Vox populi: Receive 15 upvotes on your comments across the learning platform. | |
| Influencer: Receive 30 upvotes on your comments across the learning platform. |
You can even tie together multiple criteria to award particularly difficult to acquire badges:
| Social Master: Complete the Exploring Social Learning LX AND make 50 comments AND give 10 votes. |
Upping your game:
In one course we were exploring the subject of Artificial Intelligence (AI), a topic that has a lot of arguments for and against. We wanted to highlight both sides of this discussion , so this is what we did:
- Curated 3 pieces of content for and 3 against AI.
- Once we'd added these into the AI level of the LX we tagged each of these objects with the tag "Opinion Balancer".
- We created a badge called Opinion Balancer and set the criteria so that it was only awarded when people had viewed 6 pieces of content (3 for + 3 against) that were tagged Opinion Balancer.
This approach could be used for other subjects in which you want participants to consider differing views and perspectives.
Note: If you are an user, you may be interested in awarding Credly badges using . Click here to read the guide on it.