Badges are a good way of celebrating achievement, showing progress and encouraging student participation / engagement through gamification. They are available to participants enrolled in the course and related to the activities within it.

Badges are 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

1. Access the Course administration tab (via the edit menu, click on More at the bottom of the menu).
   
2. Click on Add a new badge
3. Give the badge a name and a description
   
   
   
   
4. Upload or choose an existing image for the badge. Badge images are displayed at 100 x 100 pixels.
   
   
   
   
5. Change the Issuer details from the default 'Moodle Warwick' and 'moodle@warwick.ac.uk' to something more meaningful such as your department / module name and email address.
6. Set an expiry date - this is entirely optional.

Designing a badge image

Badge images can be as simple or complex as required, although as they are displayed at (as noted above) 100 x 100 pixels, it is best to keep the details distinct and not too crowded.

Badges can be created in any graphics package you are familiar with, even Paint. At Warwick we suggest GIMP and Paint.net for Windows - you can see a list here with more options.

You can use images or text on the badge to indicate what it is for - see some examples here.

The example below is a badge which could form part of a set of 3 - Novice, Intermediate, Expert (for example) - using a visual approach of 1 to 3 stars.

Link the badge to an activity

Criteria

For course badges, the criteria are: Manual issue by role; course completion; activity completion.

Manual issue by role

1. Choose the roles that can issue the badge. This list will differ depending on your own role for the course.
2. 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.

Activity completion

First turn on activity completion for one or all of the activities that you wish to award the badge for.

1. In the activity settings, choose 'Show activity as complete'
2. Choose one of the available options (these will differ depending on the activity type).

Next, go to the Manage badges section, and choose Activity completion from the drop down list (see above).

1. 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.
2. Choose whether the badge is awarded if all the activites chosen have to be completed first, or if the badge is awarded when any one of the activities is complete.

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.

Course completion must be setup via the cog edit menu in order to use this.

Once this is available, 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.

Criteria for being awarded the badge will appear on the Manage badges page.

Enable the badge

Finally, you need to make your badge available to participants by enabling it.

Go to Manage badges, click on Edit details, and you will see a banner 'This badge is currently not available to users'. Click on 'Enable access'.

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Displaying a badge

If you have been issued with a badge on completion of some work, it will appear in your 'Latest Badges' block which you can add to your Dashboard (please also see information on adding and configuring blocks).

After adding the block to the page:

1. Choose the number of badges to display (from 1 to all).
2. This section is preset and cannot be altered as the latest badges black can only appear on the dashboard.
3. Choose whether the block appears on the right or centre (content) of the page.

Save the changes and the latest badges block will be added and will display the badges you have earnt.

For more guidance on managing badges, see:

• Managing badges (Moodle docs)