Achievements

Achievements

Extrinsic motivators can be a powerful tool for encouraging students to work hard in your courses. Recognizing a student's accomplishments is one of the best rewards for a job well done. You can use Achievements to keep students motivated and congratulate them for how they've participated in your course.

Achievements include the following features:

• Create course badges and set criteria for students to earn the badges. 
• Review which students have earned a course badge. 
• Students can access the requirements to earn a course badge. 
• Students can access both earned and unearned course badges. 

Achievements can also be used in Ultra organizations. 

The Achievements tool supports learning in multiple ways. You can: 

• Support self-directed learning pathways. You can give learners tasks, goals, or quests with clearly defined criteria. Learners can have more flexibility in how they approach their activities. They might choose to focus on a particular area of development before moving on to another. This can replace a set sequence, personalizing the learning. 
• Engage and motivate learners. Some learners respond to extrinsic motivations. They feel accomplished when they complete tasks. Some teaching methods add game mechanics to a course this way. 
• Adds transparency of learning. Course badges that define the skills and competencies in a course can help students in several ways: 
  • Students can better review how they’re developing competencies. 
  • Students can better understand and articulate to others what they’re learning.

Achievements are an opt-in feature. Your administrator must turn the feature on for Achievements to be available.

Create an Achievement

Users with privileges to manage Achievements can create course badges. You have the following options:

• Create, publish, and delete a course badge 
• Set a badge image from a badge library 
• Set performance criteria for one or more gradable items or gradebook calculations in the course. With multiple performance criteria, students must meet all of them to earn the course badge. 

Go to the Achievements tab and select + New Course Badge. 

You can also choose to edit course badges that were saved as draft by going the three-dot menu and selecting Edit in the dropdown. Published course badges can't be edited and can only be deleted by selecting Delete from the three-dot menu's dropdown.

On the course badge creation page, you can set the title and description for the badge. The description is limited to 500 characters. Select an image to represent the course badge. A variety of images are offered covering a range of learner expectations. You must set at least one performance criterion for the course badge. 

First, select a gradable item from the course. Then, set the expected level of performance for the student to earn the badge. You can add additional requirements by selecting Add performance criteria. To remove a criterion, select the trash can icon. Students must meet all criteria to be awarded the course badge. The summary section shows how the course badge will appear to students.

View recipients of Achievements 

The recipient count appears for each course badge in the Achievement tab. Select a course badge to review the details of the recipients on the Recipients tab. The Recipients tab shows the date and time the recipient earned the course badge. To review the settings for the badge, select the Badge Settings tab.

Reviewing Achievements as a student 

On the Achievements tab, students can review the details of badges and the requirements to earn them. They can also determine which badges they earned, and which remain unearned. When a student earns a badge, the badge also displays the date and time the badge was earned.

If the course has no Achievements, the Achievements tab won't be available.

Notes

• When overall grade or a calculated column is a performance criterion, that calculation itself is not enough to earn the achievement. Students must have scores for all gradable items used for the calculation. This requirement prevents a running total issuing a badge before a student completes all tasks.
• When a gradable item has multiple attempts, it is calculated using one of the following: last attempt, first attempt, highest score, lowest score, or average of all attempts. If you need to change this setting, we recommend doing so before grading submissions. If you change it after grading, calculation updates may not award new achievements to students. If you encounter this issue, you can update student grades again for the item.
• An earned achievement isn’t revoked if an instructor changes a student’s grades.
• Custom badge images aren’t supported in this release.
• Student preview isn’t supported in this release.
• Once an achievement is published, it can’t be changed. If there is a configuration error, delete the achievement and create it again.
• Achievements from Original course view do not convert when copying or importing a course.
• Achievements can’t be copied from one Ultra course to another. We plan to support this in a future release.
• Blackboard sends out events for changes to calculated columns every 4 hours; therefore, Achievements using a calculated column will have a delay before they are awarded.
• For calculated columns, if there are contributing gradable items that are ungraded, any Achievements based on that calculated column will not be issued until all grades are posted.

Additional considerations:

• Student preview isn’t supported in this release.
• Course copy for achievements isn’t supported in this release.
• Administrators can restrict who can manage achievements and view recipients of badges. Manage privileges for Achievements in Course Role and System Role configurations.
• The Achievements management pages found in the Administrator panel main page and the Tools area are only for Original. These don’t apply to Achievements in Ultra. To configure Achievements in Ultra, go to Ultra Experience Management.