Presentation of the Master thesis, Graz University of Technology, October 2015

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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

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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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Prototype

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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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Backpacks

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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