[Credentials/Badges] Create OR operator when determining awarded badges

[OmarAlmamoori]

Hi,

Currently, through badgr, teachers can create badges that may be awarded to students who achieve a grade of 80% or higher on an assignment. In addition, they can create another badge that can be awarded to students who achieve a grade of 100% on the same assignment! As a result, students who receive a 100% score will also receive the badge awarded to students who receive an 80% or higher grade. There is no "OR" operator in determining which badges are awarded from one assignment; if they meet the criteria for multiple badges, they receive them all.

We, as teachers, however, are seeking to assign different badges to different students on a single assignment in a single module. In my reading class, for example, I would like to award students different badges based on their performance on daily reading assignments. As an example, if they achieve 80%, they receive the golden badge, if they achieve 50%, they receive the basic badge, and if they achieve 10%, they receive the developing badge. Therefore, they should not receive both the basic badge and the golden badge at the same time so that we can create a constructive competition.  

What you guys think??!

[James]

@OmarAlmamoori 

You asked what we thought, so let me share my experience.

I started using badges this semester for the first time ever. I'll readily admit that I am not an expert and don't know the best way to do things. Nor can I design a badge on my own without taking an emoji and sticking it inside some kind of polygon.

I wanted to make some badges easy to obtain and others a bit more challenging, so I created two levels of badges for most projects. Level A is for completing the assignments with at least 1 point and level B is for completing the assignments with at least 75% of the points. For other really-important assignments, I make a module that contains just the one assignment and set 100% completion as the requirement.

To encourage the students to engage (I teach freshman and sophomore college students), I'm running a little competition with a prize at the end that you have to be in top 5 badge earners to be eligible. 

That competition is what makes me like it the way it is.

The badges have no weight to them. There's nothing in the system to distinguish between a level A and level B badge. In your case, there would be nothing to distinguish between gold, basic, and developing. The leaderboard would be meaningless in we only awarded one badge per item.

Since I cannot weight the badges automatically, I went with the number of badges instead. Everyone (who does all the assignments) gets something to keep them from getting discouraged and those who do well get a second something.

You don't have to show the leaderboard to the students. That makes more sense in your case than in my situation.

Overall, the layout seems to work well for someone who has no clue what they are doing.

I do not like that once Canvas embedded Badgr in an iframe, they are using third party cookies that are getting blocked and causing the system to run slowly.

I do not like is that I had to duplicate every module in Canvas with different requirements for completion, but it lets the students see where they are towards completion of the badge. That also ruined the modules for me -- I used to use modules to hold logical groups of assignments (say for the week), but the badges may span multiple logical groups. I figured that trying to mix week 1, week 2, ..., week 16 modules with modules for badges would be too confusing, so I dropped the modules for the weeks. Your case would be even worse than mine since you want three levels for every badge.

I also had to make sure not to create any badges for doing well at Kahoot! as I didn't wanted to keep the leaderboard anonymous rather than letting students figure out who was who.

With your situation, it's a little more complicated than just using a case structure [the programming analogy to a piecewise function in mathematics where you can only have one of several options]. You would have to allow for the automatic removal of badges. But then you have the situation of "taking away" something that someone has earned. That seems to go against the traditional notation of a badge. When I was in Cub Scouts and earning badges as a child, they didn't take away my badges when I moved up to the next level, they let me keep them. That seems more like what people expect with a badge.

I tried the badges concept once before, except it wasn't called badges. It was the outcomes gradebook. That didn't work for me either, but that gave students an idea of what needed completed. I've tried module requirements and while some students like the ability to check off that they had completed something, most students found the modules too long to be useful (and my home page loaded really slowly).

I've not tried it, but it seems like your concept is kind of like mastery learning. Instead of using badges, it's more what Canvas is going for with Mastery Connect where you can see your progress on items. In other ways, it reminds me of mastery paths within Canvas where students only take one path (and you could tie the badge to completion of a particular path).

For your situation, it seems (from an outsider's perspective) that instead of saying "this is where you're at", a badge indicates "this is the level you've met." Then getting three badges is just fine for the student, but it's going to get really crowded.

Then, there is the tradeoff between what currently exists and what you're suggesting. Currently, I have to duplicate each module and it's requirements and then change the requirement levels. Thankfully I know how to program using the API because that is a nightmare by hand when you have lots of assignments in those modules.

Putting the alternatives within a single module is that the module really complicates the interface. You either have to set the options for each requirement or you set the requirements for the entire module and preclude the ability to change them for individual assignments. The situation where you want 80% for some assignments but 50% for others makes it very messy. A simple interface without a lot of choices is one (or at least was one back in 2017) of Canvas' design goals.

If you allow for the removal of badges (still not sold on that concept) when you complete a higher level, then you also have you have to have some kind of hierarchy or at least a "badge C cancels badges A and B logic." Again, we're getting messy.

I initially liked the idea because it kind of mirrored what I had wanted to accomplish. But the more I think about it, I don't think it's the right path to take.

If that functionality was built into the badges itself, rather than into the modules, it might be smoother. Instead of just "Complete Item" it allowed "Complete item with 10%" or "Complete item with 80%". Then I could duplicate just the badge (the functionality already exists) and change one setting. The ability to limit it to have mutually exclusive badges could be built in there, rather than in the modules inside Canvas. 

The downside is the tracking that isn't available in Canvas anymore when you do that. If you have one module with different levels of requirements, how does Canvas show a student that they've completed the requirement for the module progression? It's a checkbox. It doesn't have levels of checkbox to indicate which level they met, it's either yes or no.

It just seems that badges is the wrong fit for this.

But like I said, I don't know what I'm doing with badges.

[OmarAlmamoori]

Thank you so much, James, for sharing your experience. Yes, Badgr as it is now might be useful in some circumstances. However, I suggested creating a system so that Badgr might represent student grades, ideally with the teacher having already established the credit-based standards. To the best of my knowledge, this would be more consistent with the different teaching styles in a variety of classrooms. This means that students may obtain certain badges or others. So if it was programmed to do that, it won't be congested or anything.

I'm not an expert in programming or Bagr, but I think it would be fantastic if they created a badgr that could be tied to assignments rather than modules on Canvas. For instance, students are given badges based on their grades. In other words, teachers set the criteria and design the badges and during of after grading is complete, bagdr assigns students badges accordingly. 

[KristinL]

Thank you for sharing this idea with the Instructure Community!

The Product Team reviewed all feature proposals recently, and unfortunately, this thread was identified as one that they would not be able to include in their current or future plans. While we appreciate your proposal, we also want to be transparent about the likelihood of something like this making it to production.

Thank you for collaborating, and we hope that you submit another idea in the future!