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u Open Badges for Learning Environments
S C I E N C E P A S S I O N T E C H N O L O G Y
u www.tugraz.at
Open Badges for Learning
Environments
Mario Wüster
Supervisor: Assoc.Prof.Dipl.-Ing.Dr.techn. Martin Ebner
October 22, 2015
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1. Research Question
2. Learning Environments
3. Open Badge (Infrastructure)
4. Motivation
5. General Approaches for Integration
6. Prototype
7. Evaluation
8. Conclusion
Contents
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Research Question
How to integrate Open Badges in Learning
Environments [and to enable automatic badge issuing
based on defined criteria] ?
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Learning Environments
• Online learning platform supporting:
• Users with different roles
• Courses
• Course management
• Corresponding course material
• A set of tools for communication, content creation and
E-Assessments
Learn Management Systems (LMS)
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC)
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• Micro vs. Meta Badge
• Incentive vs. Credential
• Digitally signed JSON Web Signature (JWS)
WHOM?
WHICH?
WHY?WHO?
Assertion
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Badges/FAQs
(In cooperation with the P2PU and funds of McArthur Foundation)
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Open Badge Infrastructure
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Badges/Onboarding-Issuer
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Motivation
• Hard to motivate learners to actively participate in
non-formal and informal educational systems if they
do not get any recognition for their achievements
• Mostly no recognition at all for gained skills if a
course has not been completed
• Just summative feedback
• No common standard for acknowledgements
• Certificates are not digitially signed
Open Badges could help to diminish or even resolve
those issues
• Formal: organized, structured, supported, intentional & certified
• Non-formal: formal, but not in edu. institutions & w/o certification
• Informal: through made experiences, independent of the context
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- Modify Source Code
- Plug-In
- Add-On/Add-In
- SaaS
- Own Web Application
General Integration Approaches
Source code has to be known
High risk on introducing errors in the
base system
Base system updates could harm the
badging system
No community that maintains code
Fast
Highly customizable
Time (=Money)
Programmer
Support
API needed
High customization
Fast bug fixing & integration of new
features
Full control over student & badge data
Typically not free of charge
Data has to be transmitted to an
foreign server
Limited customization
What happens if subscription gets
cancelled sometimes? How to
backup/transfer data ?
Most simplest way to use OpenBadges
Complete solutions (issuing, managing,
displaying)
Professional support
Reliable system
No need to have programming skills
Base system has to provide API.
Limited customization
Dynamically loaded
Does not influence core system
Huge community
Mostly compatible to multiple base
systems
Compatible to certain system only
One has to have knowledge of the base
system’s infrastructure
Add-Ins (typically) cannot be removed
without harming the base system
Nevertheless – legit option
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Prototype - Features
1. Badge management (CRUD + control availability)
via backend (pw protected .htaccess)
2. Assert badges manually
3. Assert badges automatically - triggered by the
iMooX user
4. Display rudimentary awarding statistics
5. Currently, supporting 2 different types of badges
i. Quiz-Level Badge
ii. Course-Level Badge
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Automatic badge issuing
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Evaluation COER15
• Started on May 11, 2015 (6x units)
• 6x Quizzes + final evaluation required to pass the
course
• 432 distinct enrollments
• 124 active users (tried at least one quiz)
• 208 theoretically earned badges
• 137 actually generated badges
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Conclusion
• Prototype:
• Web application worked well from the functional point of
view
• Just a few design issues have been reported by some
badge earners (filename, email, criteria design)
• General:
• Badge issuing can be implemented relatively fast and easy
( thus relatively cheap )
• Hot topic on various E-Learning focused conferences (e.g.
oeb 2015 (http://www.online-educa.com/programme),
ALT Conference 2015 (https://altc.alt.ac.uk/2015/activity/open-badges/ ) )
• So it`s not just me who believes Open Badges are
great
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Thanks for
your attention !
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Sources/Important Links
• Bernhard Hoisl, Wolfgang Aigner, and Silvia Miksch. Online Communities and Social
Computing. Ed. by Douglas Schuler. Vol. 4564. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin
Heidelberg, 2007, pp. 362–371. isbn: 978-3-540-73256-3. doi: 10.1007/978-3-540-73257-0 (Slide 6).
• Mozilla‘s Open Badges http://openbadges.org/
• Open Badges Specification https://openbadgespec.org/
• iMooX http://imoox.at/wbtmaster/startseite/
• Moodle https://moodle.org/
• edX https://www.edx.org/home
• Coursera https://www.coursera.org/
• Udacity https://www.udacity.com/
• Iversity https://iversity.org/de
• Blackboard http://de.blackboard.com/sites/international/globalmaster/
• Open Badge Passport https://openbadgepassport.com/
• JSON http://json.org/
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Sources/Important Links
• Credly https://credly.com/
• Open Badge Factory https://openbadgefactory.com/
• OpenElms http://openelms.org/
• Canvas http://www.canvaslms.com/
• Apache Tomcat http://tomcat.apache.org/
• jQuery https://jquery.com/
• Bootstrap http://getbootstrap.com/
• MySql https://www.mysql.de/
• Hibernate http://hibernate.org/
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Badge Assertion & Badge Class Example
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Issuer & Criteria
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Badge concept
• How to define criteria
• Which competencies should a user gain to earn the
badge ?
• Which behavior should that badge suggest ?
• How to proof gained knowledge ?
• How should it look like (badge design) ?
• Which tags to use (for searching) ?
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Automatic badge issuing
• Highly depens on the context
• Mostly triggered by user-events:
• Click events: Navigation, resource watching (video, e-paper...)
, downloaded resources (papers, videos, images ... )
• Submissions: File, text, algorithm, source code ...
• E-Assessment: Open- and closed tasks like T/F, Selective,
Sorting and Short/Long texts, subsets or clozes.
Badging system has to be aware of those events!
• Realization therefore depends on selected integration
approach
Visiting each page Starting, time
True/false, amount of
different downloads...
Automatic checking,
word count, text
analysis
Automatic testing
Notas del editor
Moodle since 2.5 (May 2013) release (current 2.9) integrated badge support. Blackboard too since End of 2014.
Open Badges Issuer Add-On (https://wordpress.org/plugins/badgeos-open-badges-issuer-add-on/) for the WordPress Plug-In BadgeOS (https://github.com/opencredit/badgeos)
Oeb: the global, cross-sector conference on technology supported learning and training (Berlin, Dec. 2-4, 2015)
ALT: Association for Learning Technology ( Annual Conference ) – use BadgeOS and OpenBadgeIssuer Plugin for Wordpress – Badges for Speakers, Programme Committee and Participants. ( 8-10 September 2015)