The UCEM Accessibility Awareness Course was launched in November 2021 with a suite of open badges to be earned on the course. Initially, the course was set up to offer badges manually due to an integration issue (on the hosted Moodle platform).
As the course became popular, it was difficult to keep up with manual badge issuing on the Open Badge Factory platform and now the open badges for milestones, on completion of quizzes, are offered automatically via the Moodle platform itself.
As a participant “completes” the activity the badge is issued automatically. The activity completion is defined as earning 100% on the quiz within the given three attempts. Only if this criterion is fulfilled the badge will be issued. This works well for milestone badges as the criteria can be defined clearly.
The final Accessibility Awareness badge is issued when the participant submits a reflective account of their learning. Currently, this badge is offered manually after reviewing their submission. On an open course, how could this be automated?
Moodle Forums allow several criteria that can automatically be tracked for activity completion.
- Student must view this activity to complete it
- Student must post discussions or replies
- Student must create discussions
- Student must post replies
However, none of these criteria is able to check the quality of the post as a reviewer would. One could post lorem ipsum text to meet the criteria of creating a post or reply.
Would this devalue the badge offered? This being the last activity, can we trust the learner who has gone through the course to do the “right thing”? What are your thoughts?
I am a Learning Technology Researcher and the Chair of the Online Learning Research Centre at the University College of Estate Management. My principle research interests lie in the area of social implications of information and communication technologies, especially eLearning.