How to display a digital badge from a Moodle site on an Open Badges portfolio

(This post has been updated in 2019 following the transition of Open Badges from the Mozilla platform to the Badgr platform.)


Have you received a digital badge?
If you've received a badge from a Moodle site where you've completed an online course, you'll usually be notified by email, for example:

Click one of the links in the email to access the badge on the Moodle site. You'll see your name, the issuer name, and other details. For example:

If you know you've received a badge but don't get this email, don't worry. You can access the badge on your Moodle site by visiting <your Moodle site address>/badges/mybadges.php

Adding your badge on badgr.com 
Step 1: Download the badge from your Moodle site by clicking the 'download' link that appears right under the badge. (You may also see an option to add the badge directly to a backpack, but if you don't see this link or it doesn't work, you can add the badge manually to a badge portfolio by following the steps below.) 

Step 2: Create an account on the badgr.com website. 

Step 3: Login to your account on badgr.com and click the 'Add badge' button. Upload the image file of the badge that you downloaded from your Moodle site. 

Step 4: Adding a badge doesn't automatically make it public. If you would like to display your badge publicly, you have to create a badge collection. Click on the 'Collections' tab in your Badgr account and then click 'Create collection'. 

Step 5: Drag the badge you have uploaded into the collection you have just created. 

Step 6: Enable the 'Public' option right under the collection. Then click the 'Share' link to get the public link to your collection. 

Step 7: Add the public link anywhere you'd like! Any time you want to add a new badge to this public collection or to a new collection, simply repeat the above steps.

Permissions snafu when importing across courses in Moodle

The import feature in Moodle allows you to copy over resources and activites from one course into another.

When you start the import process, you choose the source course (ie, the course with the stuff you want to import) and you get to choose what to import: activities/resources, question bank, filters, blocks, etc.

Consider this scenario:

1. You have a forum in an old course for which you have removed posting permissions (maybe because you have students in that course who stay enrolled but you don't want them to use the forums any more).

2. You want to import a Book resource from the old course into a new course. You do not want to import the forums.

When you carry out this import, you would of course have the Book resource in your new course, but you may find that the students in your new course can't post on the forums any more! This is because the import process brings in the forum permissions from the old course into the new one, even though you have not imported the forums themselves. In other words, all the user permissions from the old course are copied over into the new course, regardless of which activities or resources you imported.

I would definitely put this down as one of the idiosyncrasies of Moodle. I looked it up on the Moodle Tracker and indeed there is a bug report.

So the next time you import anything from one course into another, check the user permissions in the destination course to check and fix anything that has inadvertently changed.

List of emoticons in Moodle

Depending on the cultural and digital literacy context in which you work, you may find that people use emoticons very well, awkwardly, or not at all. If you'd like to promote the use of emoticons in your Moodle courses, here's a handy reference:

Emoticon	Meaning	Characters to type

User count in the Online Users block in Moodle

In Moodle 2.6 the number of online users is not displayed in the Online Users block until you have at least 50 online users. Until that point you see only their names. Turns out the Online Users block can accommodate a maximum of 50 names. Names beyond the first 50 online users are not displayed, and the online user count magically appears at the top of the block. Sensible -- it's a lot to see the names of even 50 online users! There doesn't seem to be a way of changing this setting, at least in Moodle 2.6.

I discovered this just now -- it's the first day of the AuthorAID MOOC, which I'm facilitating, and we have more than 2000 participants! 

Efficiency tip for Moodlers dealing with many Moodle assets

So you're a super-active Moodle admin or teacher who has to dip in and out of many courses and perhaps even many Moodle sites. On your admin homepage you can use the Admin Bookmarks block to bookmark settings pages within your Moodle site, and of course all the courses you're enrolled in will appear in the Course Overview block. But these aren't enough for me. So I use a simple bookmarking scheme on Firefox. This is what my bookmarks toolbar looks like:

In the "Active spaces" bookmark folder I have links to all the active learning spaces (not all are formal courses so I prefer to say "spaces") on the main Moodle site I work on. Some links point to settings pages within courses, eg, the enrolment page for the ongoing AuthorAID MOOC so that I can quickly check how many people have enrolled. "Old spaces" has links to spaces where courses or interactions have ended but which I still need to refer to now and then. And "More Moodles" is well, a collection of links to other Moodle sites where I help out as an administrator -- these are mostly Moodle sites managed by developing countries universities that are connected to the charity I work for, INASP.

Checking on participants falling behind in a course on Moodle

There are at least two ways to do this. Easy way first:

Access the list of participants through the Navigation block on the course homepage or the People block if it's there. Look for the option called "inactive for more than" at the top of the participant list. You'll see some time periods going back to the beginning of the course. I'm now helping run a course that started on 1 February, almost three weeks back, so I see the following options:

Select an appropriate value in the drop-down list, depending on what you think counts as active participation. Then scroll down, click "select all", and then click "send a message".

Then write your message for these participants who have fallen behind -- make it an encouraging one! I would say it's a good idea to remind stragglers through this approach only once, ideally a week or so after a course begins. Then it's up to them to decide whether to come back to the course. If you keep writing to the same group of people, they're likely to get annoyed.

But what if you want to closely track who has done what in the course and send reminders to specific people, instead of a catch-all "inactive for X time" criterion?

Then the activity completion report is your friend. This is easy to get started with but requires some spreadsheet analysis:

Click the “Reports” link in the course administration menu block on the left and click “Activity completion” – you’ll see a table with icons denoting who has completed which activity. At the bottom of this table you’ll see options to download the table as a spreadsheet. Download this (a CSV file) and first save it as an XLS or ODS file so that you can use it for analysis, eg, spotting participants who have not done specific things in the course or have fallen behind. (Of course for this you would need to have used activity completion settings for the different resources and activities.) Then you would need to collect those participants' email addresses from the same spreadsheet and email them. Again, it's important to strike the right balance: reminders that are encouraging and get some participants back on track (you can't hope to win over all of them) but don't end up reaching the same people again and again with little effect.

Converting URLs into links when you write in Moodle

On your Moodle site you may find that when you enter a URL (ie, web link) it appears in plain text and not as a link. To make URLs appear automatically as links:

First, go to...
Site administration -> Plugins -> Filters -> Manage filters
...and set “Convert URLs into links and images” to On.

Then, go to...

Site administration -> Plugins -> Filters -> Convert URLs into links and images

...and place a check mark against all the options next to “apply to formats”.

You might expect that URL auto-linking would happen by default, but Moodle provides a very fine level of control to do things and sometimes this can seem like a hassle! But it’s often easy to find a solution to do something in Moodle by searching online – you’ll probably see a helpful article in Moodle Docs or a discussion on the moodle.org community forums. This is how I learn, and of course by experimenting!

Automatically link tips in a Moodle course or site

Imagine you want to include a bunch of tips somewhere in your Moodle course (or Moodle site) and you want these tips to be automatically linked whenever you mention the title of any tip, without having to manually include the link. Not only that, when clicked the link should bring up a small pop-up window with the tip, instead of redirecting to a new page. Sure, you can do that on Moodle.

Restoring grades for a student who accidentally unenrolled from a Moodle course

A couple of weeks back I was contacted by a student in the AuthorAID MOOC who had unenrolled from the course by mistake (although the danger of doing this was explicitly mentioned in the course induction section). She said she had almost completed the course and she was understandably in panic.

5 reasons Moodle's Feedback module is better than SurveyMonkey for online courses

If you run an online course on Moodle, you probably collect feedback from the students and maybe the teachers too.

SurveyMonkey is a popular tool to set up surveys and feedback forms. And there are other tools that do a similar job. They give you so many options for creating questions and collecting responses that it's easy to think of them as superior to Moodle's relatively humble Feedback module. This doesn't seem to be something that Moodle developers are very proud of, as it's not even enabled by default on a Moodle site! If you've used it, you might have wondered -- Why does the form look so bare? Why can't there be a few more question types?

So why should you use Moodle's Feedback module instead of SurveyMonkey or something else?

Here's why:

1. You can keep the feedback form anonymous and yet know who has filled out the feedback form and who hasn’t, using the Activity Completion report. This is useful to determine course completion in cases where giving feedback is mandatory. Also, when you make the form anonymous, the message "Mode: Anonymous" appears right on top of the form, which should reassure respondents.
2. How many times have you wished you could quickly figure out who didn't respond to your survey? When you use Moodle Feedback as a teacher you can see a list of non-respondents, select some or all of them, and send a message -- all from the same page!  
3. When a feedback form is spread over multiple pages, the respondent’s answers are saved from one page to the next. You can set up a similar feature on SurveyMonkey but it seems a bit complicated.
4. You can set up email alerts to be sent to the course teachers when the form is filled out each time. On SurveyMonkey, "Survey Alerts can only be sent to the main email address on the account." Bah.
5. Keeping the feedback form on the same learning platform as the course makes the form look like an integral part of the course and not a pesky extra activity.

Have you enabled and used the Feedback module in your Moodle? You should!

Readymade and free Moodle badges

1. You want to award badges to your learners on your Moodle site.
2. You know how to do this and let students link their badges to Open Badges.
3. You're stuck. How are you going to create the images that represent the badges?

Promote Open Badges when you award Moodle badges

Badges have been a feature of Moodle since version 2.5.

What's a badge? It's something you can award to your students. It's a small image with metadata. When you award it to a student on your Moodle site, they can see it in their profile page. Other students can too, if people can view each other's profiles. Good stuff, but is that it? No! These badges can be published on Mozilla Open Badges. Take a look at my Open Badges page. The badge data is also published (issuer details, badge details). I can't change any of that, so it lends the badge authenticity.