Using a CITI course as a Third Party badge in a Canvas Credentials Pathway

[LuisCeja]

For one of our canvas courses we currently have students complete several CITI courses and upload proof as an assignment. Additionally we have a Canvas Credentials Pathway and badges for the course. One of those badges in the pathway is completed via the submission of Certificates of completion for those CITI courses. We want to instead be able to have those certificates be added as third party badges added into a credentials pathway. As I have been lookign into things. It appears to me that CITI does not have any connection with an open badge platform. Where I could then add them as a third party with a badge URL or JSON. Has anyone else used a CITI certification and been able to directly integrate it as part of a badge/pathway. If so how did you accomplish. If not what might be other sugestions to better integrate the required CITI courses the students do into a pathway compared to how we do it currently. 

[ryan_corris]

Hey @LuisCeja! 

I am not familiar with CITI, but I have used Credentials for a while.  From my understanding, Credentials is specific to the Open Badges platform and unless there is a badge that follows these protocols it cannot be used with Credentials.  Have you attempted to contact CITI to find out if this is something on their roadmap?

An alternative that we have used in our district is to create our own badge and assignment with a file upload.  Once the learner has received their certificate, they can upload it to the assignment.  Once the assignment has the correct certificate submitted and is graded,  the badge will be awarded completing that step of the pathway.  We usually just set the points for the assignment to 1 point, but could be set to any point value you would chose.

Logistically, you would need to figure out where all of the learners would submit their certificates. If there is not an easy place for all learners to submit, a course could be created with the purpose of submitting the certificates for all of the CITI courses.  An assignment could be created for each CITI course option.  Any learner taking a CITI course could be added / self enrolled into this course and submit their certificates once they are received.

The downside of this method is that someone would need to check all the submissions for correct certificates. A grade would need to be entered for each submission which could take a bit of time depending on the number of students but could easily be done in SpeedGrader.  The only way I see this being done automatically is if CITI had Open Badges / JSON that could be easily imported to Credentials.  Maybe someone else will reply with another option that I am not aware of.

Feel free to reply with any questions or thoughts.

Good luck!