Open Badges for Learning Environments

1

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 EnvironmentsMario Wüster Supervisor: Assoc.Prof.Dipl.-Ing.Dr.techn. Martin Ebner

October 22, 2015

2

u Open Badges for Learning Environments

2

u

1. Research Question 2. Learning Environments3. Open Badge (Infrastructure)4. Motivation5. General Approaches for Integration6. Prototype7. Evaluation8. Conclusion

Contents

3

u Open Badges for Learning Environments

3

u

Research Question

How to integrate Open Badges in Learning Environments [and to enable automatic badge issuing

based on defined criteria] ?

4

u Open Badges for Learning Environments

4

u

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)

5

u Open Badges for Learning Environments

5

u

• 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)

6

u Open Badges for Learning Environments

6

u

Open Badge Infrastructure

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Badges/Onboarding-Issuer

7

u Open Badges for Learning Environments

7

u

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

8

u Open Badges for Learning Environments

8

u

- 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

9

u Open Badges for Learning Environments

9

u

Prototype

10

u Open Badges for Learning Environments

10

u

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 Badgeii. Course-Level Badge

11

u Open Badges for Learning Environments

11

u

Prototype

12

u Open Badges for Learning Environments

12

u

Automatic badge issuing

13

u Open Badges for Learning Environments

13

u

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

14

u Open Badges for Learning Environments

14

u

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

15

u Open Badges for Learning Environments

15

u

Thanks for your attention !

16

u Open Badges for Learning Environments

16

u

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/

17

u Open Badges for Learning Environments

17

u

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/

18

u Open Badges for Learning Environments

18

u

Badge Assertion & Badge Class Example

19

u Open Badges for Learning Environments

19

u

Issuer & Criteria

20

u Open Badges for Learning Environments

20

u

Backpacks

21

u Open Badges for Learning Environments

21

u

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) ?

22

u Open Badges for Learning Environments

22

u

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, timeTrue/false, amount of different downloads...

Automatic checking, word count, text

analysisAutomatic testing