Creating and Managing Badges
Using badges to enhance your course
Why use Badges?
Badges celebrate achievement, show progress and encourage student participation / engagement through gamification. They are available to participants enrolled in the course and related to the activities within it.
Badges can be awarded based on a variety of criteria and can be displayed on the dashboard or more widely via an 'open badges backpack'.
Create a new course badge
Go to your Moodle course
Click on the Course Management tab
In the Badges menu, click Add a new badge
Give the badge a name and a description
Upload or choose an existing image for the badge. Badges are displayed at 100x100 pixels
Change details as preferred
Set an expiry date - this is entirely optional
Click create badge
Designing a badge image
Badge images can be as simple or complex as required, they are displayed at 100 x 100 pixels
We recommend creating them at 400 x 400px
You can use images or text on the badge to indicate what it is for
The example below is a badge which could form part of a set of 3 - Beginner, Intermediate, Expert (stars = level)
Once you click Create Badge, you will see a similar screen
Editing settings for the badge
Go to your Moodle course
Click on the Course Management tab
In the Badges menu, click Manage badges
You will see your badges, click the cog icon to edit settings
From this screen you can change settings including name of badge, description, image, criteria, awarding message, recipients.
Setting criteria for the badge
The next step is to set up criteria for the badge, and you have the options displayed in the drop-down menu
Manual issue by role
Choose the roles that can issue the badge manually.
Decide if the criteria is complete (i.e. that the badge is to be issued) either once all of the roles have awarded the badge, or if any one role awards the badge.
Add a description.
Course completion
This allows a badge to be awarded automatically to participants who have completed the course. This can have extra criterion such as a minimum grade. Please note that course completion must be setup via the Course Management cog edit menu in order to use this.
When this has been set up, go to Manage badges, select the relevant badge, and choose Course completion from the list of criteria. This opens the Course completion page where you can add additional optional criteria, or press Save to use the default.
Set the course completion criteria (remember to tick enable if you need to add a date)
Add a description and click save
Criteria for being awarded the badge will appear on the Manage badges page, available via Course Management
Enable the badge
You need to make your badge available to participants by enabling it.
To do this:
Go to Course Management
Badges
Click Manage badges
Next to the relevant badge, click on 'Enable access' by clicking on the eye icon
Awarded badges
Activity completion
First turn on activity completion for one or all of the activities that you wish to award the badge for. Guide for Activity Completion
In the activity settings, in the section Activity completion, choose 'Show activity as complete'
Choose one of the available options (these will differ depending on the activity type).
Click save and return to course
In Course Management, go to the Manage badges section
Next to your badge, click the cog to edit details
Click the tab Criteria
Choose Activity completion from the drop-down list
In the window that opens, check the boxes next to the relevant activities - an activity will only appear in this list if activity completion has been setup for it as above.
Choose whether the badge is awarded if all the activities chosen have to be completed first, or if the badge is awarded when any one of the activities is complete.
Click save