Digital badges can support learning outcomes when they are designed with clear purpose and aligned to meaningful achievements. However, implementing a badging system needs thoughtful design standards and a framework that balances automation with recognition of genuine accomplishment.
If you are exploring badges for the first time, our earlier guide gives a simple introduction to what they are and why they matter.
This guide covers how to introduce digital badges within your organisation. The practical steps outlined below will help you create a system that supports learner motivation and organisational goals within Totara Learn.
How do I get started with Badges at my organisation?
Your first step is to ensure your organisation has a reliable and flexible system to issue badges. This system will need to run as long as you want your learners to be able to verify their badges, so consider a long term operation and support plan.
The next step is to consult with the stakeholders who will be creating, maintaining and issuing badges. Without an understanding of how badges work and how they can be used to add value to training programmes, there will be little investment in time or use from these stakeholders.
Once support has been received from important groups, establish an initial framework or process for the creation and issue of badges. This should include thought into how badges will be used or earned, displayed and designed.
When considering the design of badges, look at a standard that is sustainable and extensible. Consider not just the icon and wording, but the shape and colour to represent different skills, knowledge areas or types of badge.
Set some measures for success. Look at enrolment numbers, engagement, completion and learner satisfaction rates across courses before and after badges are incorporated into training programmes. Being able to quantify and qualify the benefits of badging within an organisation may encourage further investment into both badging and training.
Finally, include a degree of gamification and fun within the badging system. Learners and trainers finding enjoyment and surprise within their learning and training will help improve performance and engagement in training programmes.
How do I use badges effectively?
As one of the key stakeholders involved, letting the learners know how badges work and how they might earn and display them is important to the success of any implementation. Providing an initial badge for a simple task, such as completing the user profile field for City or Town or your own custom user field, to get learners started with badges, along with a guide to where they can be viewed, will help showcase the badging process.
Use a range of badge types across your site to help keep learners and trainers engaged in the badging process. Given badges can be linked to gaining skills or knowledge, completing tasks or gaining membership to a group, you have the opportunity to offer variety in how badges are awarded and used within your system.
As part of offering this variety, some badges can be automatically issued and some will need to be manually issued. To reduce unnecessary administrative overhead, easier to earn badges, such as for course or activity completion, should be awarded automatically by your badging system. Harder to earn badges or awards for soft skills or behaviour that need to be observed or assessed, such as displaying mediation skills within a peer group, will need to be manually issued.
Try to foster excitement in the badging process across your learners and trainers. Besides offering meaningful badges, one way to do this is by tapping into the competitive spirit of your learners and trainers. Badges displayed within user profiles and badge leaderboards can encourage others to earn badges.
What should I avoid when using badges?
Overbadging
The best approach to badging will vary across subjects and the type of training, however offering badges for the majority or even all course activities, rather than a limited number, will diminish the value of each badge.
There isn’t a magic figure for the ideal number of badges within a course as it will depend on the length and structure of the training. For example, there could be a large number of badges available within a short course, but learners will not have the opportunity to earn all of them as the course has branching activities. With learners working through different learning pathways only some badges will be available to them.
Zero-challenge badges
Offering too many easily earned badges, limits the sense of achievement a learner may feel from obtaining that badge, and again, diminish the perceived value of the award. Earning a badge should provide some type of challenge to the individual.
Meaningless badges
When creating badges, you need to provide a description of the badge including what criteria an individual has met in order to earn that badge. If you find any difficulty in describing what the badge represents, consider whether the badge has any meaning or relevance to the earner or others viewing the badge.
How can I use badges within Totara Learn?
In our first post, we described the different ways badges can be issued within Totara Learn. How you use badges within your site and each course will depend on not only the subject material covered, but also how the training is delivered and the type of learners enrolled in the course.
Here are a few ideas on how to extend your badges framework beyond activity and course completion rewards:
Course level
- Manual issue by role
- Create an observer role and assign to a handful of learners so they may award badges to their peers for demonstrating particular soft skills or providing an exemplary contribution within group activities
- Use the event monitoring functionality to stay subscribed to certain activities, such as a learner accessing an additional/non-compulsory course resources, and issue badges directly to these learners
- Course completion
- Encourage learners to share badges across social networks such as LinkedIn to help demonstrate your organisation’s and the individual’s commitment to professional development
- Activity completion
- Use stacked activity completion using the conditional access tool – e.g. restrict access to Quiz 2 based on completion of Quiz 1 for a ‘Quiz Master’ badge
- Issue a badge for unlocking and viewing bonus/secret activities within courses
System level
- Manual issue
- Issue badges to course creators and facilitators who receive a high rating within course evaluations
- Use scheduled reports to receive updates on course completions and award badges to the course facilitators – it’s important to reward everyone’s success!
- Completing a set of courses
- Create a badge for completing all ‘Basic’ or all ‘Advanced’ courses across a subject or for a common grouping of courses (that aren’t part of an existing programme)
- Profile field completion
- Use badges to identify people with certain skills, knowledge, who speak a certain language or who have common interests – badges are easy to find within a user’s profile and engender a sense of community and membership
- Audience membership
- Award badges to individuals who have completed courses or programmes within a certain period of time
- Create a new job assignment to acknowledge special contributions to the team, such as someone who usually takes out the recycling or often brings in cakes for the office
- Celebrate anniversaries at your organisation by issuing badges to staff as they hit their yearly milestone
- Program completion
- Badge for certain high-level skills or knowledge collected by completing programmes such as ‘Telecommunications Aficionado’ or ‘I know Security-fu’
- Use badges to quickly identify compliance from completion of certifications
- Highlight first aiders and health and safety officers across your company from their completion of certifications
Ready to see Badges in action?
A well planned badging framework helps learners understand how their achievements are recognised and gives your organisation a consistent way to support development. When badges are introduced with clear purpose and reviewed over time, they can strengthen engagement and provide a more visible record of progress within your LMS.
If you would like to see how a badging approach could work in practice, request a demo today to find out exactly how you could use them in your organisation.
