Badges FAQ

How can teachers/instructors award site badges?

By default, teachers/instructors can only award course badges. Only users with capabilities to manage badges in the system are able to do this, so if you wish teachers/instructors to award site badges you need to create a new role as follows:

1. Go to Administration > Site administration > Users > Permissions > Define roles and click ‘Add a new role’
2. Leave ‘Use role or archetype’ as No role’ and click the continue button
3. Give the role a name e.g. “Site badge awarder”
4. Tick the System box to allow the role to be assigned in the System context
5. Set the following capabilities to “allow”: lms/badges:awardbadge, lms/badges:viewbadges, lms/badges:configurecriteria
6. Click the button ‘Create this role”.
7. Assign the “Site badge awarder” role as a system role to the teachers you wish to award site badges.

Teachers/instructors with the role of “Site badge awarder” will see a link in the Administration block Site administration > Badges > Manage badges.

Can more than one teacher/instructor in a course award the same badge?

It’s not the user who issues the badge, but a role. Users with multiple roles will have an option to use both of them to issue badges. If the badge is awarded twice by different roles, both roles are displayed and criteria (ALL/ANY) is given. In some cases, it will be required for a badge to be awarded by several different roles. When there are, let’s say, three instructors in the course and they go to award a badge as an instructor, each of them will see the list of users who already got the badge from an instructor, so they won’t need to award the badge again.

What’s the difference between a backpack and a collection?

When you upload a badge to the Openbadges site you are adding it to your backpack, which is the general area you put your badges in (like a backpack!. You then organize them into collections (like separate little bags in your backpack) and you choose which to display on your LMS profile. So a badge may be in your backpack and not in a collection, but it must be in your backpack before it can be in a collection (note the ‘public’ box must be ticked too). Collections allow you to control which badges you share with people.

A user’s online backpack

Drag badges into a new collection to display on LMS

What size is a badge?

A badge is displayed with dimensions 100 X 100 pixels. However, a larger image may be uploaded, which will then be cropped to be a square, and then resized.

Can I award a badge based on a specific grade?

There are two ways of awarding a badge based on a specific grade.

Method 1:

Set a passing grade for the quiz in the gradebook, as explained in section 1.3 of Activity completion settings.

Method 2:

1. Create a page resource and set the restrict access conditions so that it only appears if the user obtains a certain activity grade or course total
2. Set the activity completion for the page as “view”
3. Set the badge criteria such that the page has to be completed (i.e. viewed)

Do I have to use my LMS email for my backpack?

No, you can specify the email address associated with your backpack.

Can I change a badge image once awarded?

This is not possible at the time.

Can I revoke a badge once it has been awarded?

Yes – see the section on revoking a badge in Using badges.

How can I get badges with participants’ profiles like on LMS.org?

These are not badges. These are group avatars/pictures. When you create a group in your course – see the documentation on Groups – you can add a picture to represent that group. In places such as forums, this picture is then displayed for each participant. If they are a member of several groups then several pictures will be displayed.