Award Course Badges with Achievements – 3900.102
Blackboard Learn SaaS
Ultra Experience
Ultra Course View
Impact: Instructors, Students
Related topic: Achievements
Achievements is a new capability for Ultra courses to help keep students motivated and congratulate them for their participation in a course. With Achievements:
- Instructors can create course badges and set criteria for students to earn the badges.
- Instructors can view which students earned a course badge.
- Students can review the requirements to earn a course badge.
- Students can view both earned and unearned course badges.
- Leaders can use achievements in Ultra organizations.
Achievements support learning in many ways:
Supports self-directed learning pathways. Instructors can give learners tasks, goals, or quests with clearly defined criteria. Learners 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 flexibility can replace a set sequence to personalize learning.
Engages and motivates learners. Some learners respond to extrinsic motivations. They feel accomplishment when they complete tasks. Teaching methods can use achievements to add game mechanics to a course.
Adds transparency to learning. Course badges that define the skills and competencies in a course can help students:
- Follow how they’re developing competencies.
- Understand and articulate to others what they’re learning.
With this release, there are two achievement types: course badges and Open Badges.
Create course badges
Users with privileges to manage achievements can:
- Create, publish, and delete course badges.
- Select a badge image from a badge library.
- Set performance criteria for one or more assessments in the course. With multiple performance criterion, students must meet all to earn the course badge.
- Preview how the course badge appears to students.
Image 1. Instructor view of the Achievements tab with saved course badges and the New Course Badge button
Image 2. Instructor view of the new course badge screen where you can set the title, description, badge image, and earning requirements
View recipients of achievements
On the Achievements tab, instructors can view the recipient count for each course badge. Select an achievement to review details about the recipients, including the date and time they earned the course badge. To review the settings for the badge, select Badge Settings.
Image 3. Instructor view of the Recipients tab displays course badge earners
Review 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’ve earned, and which remain unearned. When a student earns a badge, the badge displays the date and time the badge was earned.
Image 4. Student view of the Achievements tab with details of earned and unearned course badges
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.
Considerations for early adoption:
- The Achievements tab appears for all students, even when achievements aren’t used in the course. We plan to improve this in a future release.
- 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.
For administrators: This feature is opt-in using the administrator toggle Achievements in Ultra. Enable it in the Ultra configuration page of the administration panel.