Students can earn badges by completing tasks within the system. There are badges on a global level and badges for each specific course. This way the badges can help participation in each new course.
- Badges are increasingly being used in boundary systems including reward-oriented education scenarios
- Badges are visual representation of attainable goals and sub-goals
- Badges creates variable rewards for different aspects, hierarchies and purposes
Tutorial badges are rewarded when users actively explore functions of the system. It cultivates learners' habit and collect analytics on learner behavior.
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Create the first discussion thread
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Create the first reply/comment
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Shared the first external link
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Shared the first document
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Mentioned someone for the first time
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Rate the first discussion thread
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Rate the first reply/comment
Achievement badges are rewarded when learners accumulately accomplish tasks in the system, deemed valuable in education purpose or the activities of the community. It encourage learners to invest in the system and remind the users that they are on the right track.
- Created 100 discussions (continue with this at intervals, or getting more difficult)
- Created 100 replies
- Shared 20 external links
- Shared 10 Documents
Course level badges can be achieved for each course. These badges focus on participation over actually being able to use the system.
The badge is distributed to content creators deemed credible by other learners.
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Create a discussion which is marked as helpful by 1 person
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Create a discussion which is marked as helpful by 5 people
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Create a discussion which is marked as helpful by 10 people
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Create a reply which is marked as helpful by 1 person
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Create a reply which is marked as helpful by 5 people
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Create a reply which is marked as helpful by 10 people
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Shared a link/document which is marked as helpful by 1 person
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Shared a link/document which is marked as helpful by 5 people
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Shared a link/document which is marked as helpful by 10 people
Supervised badges are only distributed by supervision (e.g. lecturer, teaching assistant and more) to learners who contributed the discussion in a valuable manner. It helps to identify advanced learners and help validate the credibility of valuable threads, documents, links and explanations.
Some way of moderating is important to prevent spam or students trying to game the system to get badges.
- Word limit (minimum)
- User credit scores (e.g. based on badges, ratings)
- Pre-approved website domains for link/document screening
- Gao, H., Chen, Y., Lee, K., Palsetia, D., & Choudhary, A. N. (2012, February). Towards Online Spam Filtering in Social Networks. In NDSS (Vol. 12, No. 2012, pp. 1-16)
- Abramovich, S., Schunn, C., & Higashi, R. M. (2013). Are badges useful in education?: It depends upon the type of badge and expertise of learner. Educational Technology Research and Development, 61(2), 217-232
- Rughiniș, R. (2013). Badge architectures in engineering education