Experience researching and creating badges

I am experimenting with creating badges for a new ABE course that will include technology skills to prepare students for the new online GED exam and help them explore college and career options.

First, I hoped to find existing badges to use. Google searching for badges turned up commentary about badges instead. Through the Mozilla wiki listing of badge issuers I found many examples of badges used in different settings but no tech badges that would be available to my students (could this be true?). There are many badge collections in Peer to Peer University, including an interesting National Writing Project site called Youth Voices that facilitates peer-reviewing and includes a nice set of exemplars to support it (not useful for this particular class).

Next, I tried out DIY badge sites, comparing the functions of Credly, ClassBadges and Edmodo. Credly won me over. The dashboard of ClassBadges is more specifically set up for a teacher to manage courses and students but it's visually unappealing and not as intuitive as Credly. Also the function allowing me to publish a badge to the Mozilla backpack was broken today. Edmodo lost my interest. It seemed aimed at teachers of younger students, and I didn't see a way to publish to Mozilla, although I gave up pretty quickly. On Credly I managed to create a badge, award it to a test user, get the email of the award, register the test user on Credly, accept the badge and publish a Credly badge to Mozilla.

A huge benefit I can see in this process is that it requires me, as teacher, to get very clear and explicit about the learning objectives and give students transparent guidance about how they can monitor and assess their progress.

I am concerned with:

• the impact of external "rewards" - is a badge a reward or evidence of assessment
• my time in creating the badges and then awarding them (not automatic online)
• my time in setting up a badge site if any? Use Moodle with ABE? Use BuddyPress
• the time and skills that it will take students to set up and manage a badge collection

The student hurdles include:

• create email address
• have access to web for email
• have email management skills
• create account on Mozilla to get backpack
• create "persona" account to do Mozilla log in
• do Credly site acceptance steps at first log in
• accept each Credly badge by going to the Credly site
• (option) move each badge from Credly to 3d party site like Mozilla, Facebook, etc.
• (option) organize badges in collections in the backpack for display