Award Open Badges Automatically with Anthology Milestone – 3900.102
Blackboard Learn SaaS
Ultra Experience
Ultra Course View
Impact: Instructors, Students, Academic leaders
Achievements in Blackboard can be linked to Open Badges in Anthology Milestone. When linked, earned Open Badges are issued automatically to the student’s profile in Blackboard.
Anthology Milestone is a solution for managing institutional micro-credentials and badges. It can issue transferable Open Badges that offer several benefits for education, professional development, and career advancement:
- Verified and Trustworthy: Transferable Open Badges are digital credentials that are securely checked for authenticity. They prove that the skills and achievements they represent are reliable and recognized by schools and employers.
- Easy to Share: These badges can be shown on different platforms like LinkedIn, personal websites, digital resumes, and social media. This makes it easy for people to keep a consistent record of their skills and achievements, no matter where they work or study.
- Supports Lifelong Learning: Transferable Open Badges allow people to collect and show their skills over time, helping them continue learning throughout their lives.
- Personalized: Individuals can choose and organize their badges to reflect their unique skills, learning experiences, and career goals. They can manage and display their badges with a free Achievement Studio account or transfer them to another system.
- Clear and Trustworthy: The information included in Open Badges makes it clear what skills were demonstrated and how they were assessed.
- Works Across Platforms: Open Badges follow open standards, so they can be used and recognized on different systems and platforms.
- Inclusive: Open Badges can recognize a variety of skills, including those that might not be acknowledged by traditional education, like soft skills, informal learning, and community involvement.
Set up Open Badges with Achievements
An administrator must first set up the Anthology Milestone integration.
Once enabled, users with privileges to manage achievements in Blackboard can:
- Add an Open Badge to a course or organization.
- Set performance criteria required to earn the badge.
Add an Open Badge
On the Achievements tab, select Use Open Badge. Search for and select an Open Badge from Milestone. Then work with the badge like any other. For more information, see Achievements.
Image 1. Instructor view of the Achievements tab with Milestone integration enabled. The Use Open Badge button appears on the tab
Image 2. Instructor view of the Select an Open Badge screen. It displays a list of Open Badges from Milestone
Set performance criteria and preview the badge
After you select an open badge, you can set performance criteria for one or more assessments in the course. With multiple performance criterion, students must meet all to earn the Open Badge.
In the Summary section, you can preview how the Open Badge will appear to students in Blackboard.
Image 3. Instructor view of Earning Requirements where you can set the performance criteria required to earn the Open Badge and preview the how the badge appears for students
Students earning Open Badges
When students earn an Open Badge, they receive an email at the address associated with their Blackboard profile. Students can manage their earned Open Badges using an Achievement Studio account. To manage their Open Badge, the Achievement Studio account profile should include the same email address.
From Achievement Studio, students can:
- View an Open Badge
- Add it to a collection
- Download it
- Get a sharing link
For more information about student tasks in Achievement Studio, see Badges Overview.
Image 4. Student view of an Open Badge in Achievement Studio
Enable Anthology Milestone
If you license Anthology Milestone, you can integrate it into the Achievements tool in Blackboard. When using Ultra courses in Blackboard, instructors and course builders can link performance criteria to Open Badges in Milestone.
Currently, there are not distinct production and test/stage instances of Milestone. Therefore, we recommend only integrating Milestone with your production instance of Blackboard. This is to avoid accidentally issuing authentic Open Badges from a testing environment.
To set up the integration, contact Product Support for Milestone. In the request, provide the following:
- State your request to integrate Milestone with Blackboard.
- Provide the tenant ID of your production Blackboard instance.
- Access the Administrator Panel.
- Navigate to Building Blocks and click the link to list Installed Building Blocks.
- In the context menu for Foundations Connector, select Settings.
- The Tenant ID is second in the list.
Notes:
- Administrators must set up the integration with Milestone.
- Open Badges can be used in Ultra courses and organizations.
- Users without an email address won’t be able to use the Open Badge picker. Students must have an email address in their Blackboard profile to receive Open Badges they earn.
- Any user with privileges to manage achievements can link to Open Badges. We plan to limit this access in a future release.
- An earned achievement isn’t revoked if an instructor changes a student’s grades.
- Deleting an achievement that’s linked to an Open Badge doesn’t delete that badge in Milestone.
- Student preview isn’t supported for earning Open Badges.
For administrators: This feature requires licensing Anthology Milestone. The integration is configured as an LTI tool. A new LTI placement type adds appropriate Open Badge tools into the Achievements tool. This placement type should not be used for other LTI tools.
You can manage the Achievements privileges in Course Role and System Role configurations. In this release, there aren’t separate privileges for users who can set up Open Badges versus course badges using Achievements. You may want to consider a limited rollout of Achievements until we address this with separate privileges in an upcoming release.