Creating a Badge
Creating a badge is a simple process:
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Select 'Preparing Badges' from the left hand navigation bar
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Select 'Managing Badges'
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Select the 'Create badge' button
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Work through the tabbed areas ('Details', 'Graphics', 'Criteria' and 'Badge attribute') defining and describing your badge
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At any point you can save the badge as a 'draft' and return at a later date to continue working on it
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When you are happy with your badge definition, select the 'Publish' button. Once published, your badge becomes available to issue to deserving recipients.
When you create your first badge you will need to ensure that you have a badge graphic made in order to be able to full create a badge and then issue that badge. Simply go to 'Preparing Badges' and choose 'Graphics Library'. You then select 'Create Graphic' in the top right hand corner of the page. Once you have done this process you will then be able to create a badge that can then be issued out.
Published badges can be withdrawn at any time. Withdrawing a badge makes it unavailable for issuing to any further recipients. A withdrawn badge can be republished, allowing it to be awarded to recipients.
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Details
Each badge requires a name, description, language choice and issuer. Optionally, you can choose to add an expiry period to the badge. The period is added to the batch issued date to determine the actual expiry date of the badge when issued to a recipient.
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Criteria
The badge criteria details why the badge was issued, the reason why the recipient received that badge and what they did to achieve it. This criteria can either be set upon your own website and a link provided or you can define this within openbadges.me.
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Badge Attributes
You can set up your own attributes associated with your badges. These attributes will be included within your badge and can be accessed and displayed by the openbadges.me backpack.
Reporting
Basic Reporting
The basic reporting simply shows the number of badges for selected organisations over a chosen period of time.
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A list of organisations allows the user to choose which organisation, or combination of their organisations they wish to report on.
The reporting date period is flexible. A user can select which days, months or years they want to report on.
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By default, the reporting results are shown in a cumulative way. A break down option changes the presentation to show the number of badges issued on a daily or monthly basis.
Enhanced Reporting
Enhanced reporting shows information of the badges issued by an organisation in much more detail.
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When selecting the 'show breakdown' option, the reporting results not only show the cumulative or breakdown graph but additionally display individual summaries of the badges represented on the graph.
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Each badge summary shows how many badges of this type were issued and to whom.
Reporting API
Using the Events API reporting services, you get
Details on
all your organisations rules
A list of completions
for a single rule
The recipients of all awarded badges
The recipients
of a single
badge
Badge Issuer
An issuer is a person or organisation who awards badges to earners. Issuers create, publish and award the badges to earners.
The issuer is responsible for:
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creating and defining the badges
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deciding who to issue them to
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hosting the data for the badges they award.
Stored within each badge is the badge Issuer profile. You can issue badges from a single issuer or you can set-up multiple issuers to meet your needs.
If you amend your Issuer profile then only new badges issued will include the new profile information.
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Against each issuer, you need to set-up the following
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Issuer name
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The openbadges.me organisation the issuer is associated with
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Your website address
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A brief description of what your organisation does
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An optional logo
API Automation
To set these up just go to the API keys section within System settings of Openbadges.me account.
Before you can start using the APIs you must set-up a developer key and have a security authentication token. These will ensure your data is protected and secure within openbadges.me.
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Getting Started
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Issue Badge API: Issuing a Badge to a Recipient
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​With the unique badge identifier, you can use the API ‘/api/ActivityEvents’ service to issue that badge:
https//events.openbadges.me/api/ActivityEvents
Every badge within Openbadges.me has a unique identifier that can be used to directly issue a badge to single or multiple recipients via the Events API.
The badge identifier can be found on the Openbadges.me badge summary screen (bottom left corner).
All API service calls are called from https://events.openbadges.me
A developer guide to using the API is available on the following link:
https://events.openbadges.me/swagger/index.html?url=/swagger/v1/swagger.json​
Openbadges.me allows you to issue badges using a powerful set of Application Program Interfaces (APIs).
​These APIs support the direct issuing of a specific badge to a specific recipient or the automatic event rules-based issuing of badges.
​Calls to the API services can easily be integrated into organisational application software to trigger the awarding and issuing of Openbadges.me badges.
To issue a badge, you will need to pass the following fields to the API:
ActivityId: The unique badge identifier
ActivityTime: The date and time the badge was achieved
UserId: Unique recipient id, which can be an email or reference number
Email: The email address of the recipient
FirstName: The first name of the recipient
LastName: The surname name of the recipient
Branding
Customise the look of openbadges.me to match your organisation's colour scheme or personal preference. All saved branding changes are immediately applied to your openbadges.me display.
Only administrative users of openbadges.me will see the branding changes. No changes are shared with your openbadges.me backpack users.
COLOURS
You can change the colour of:
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The navigation menu
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The navigation menu text
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The highlight colour, used when items and button are selected on any openbadges.me screen
LOGO
Customise your openbadges.me by uploading your logo, JPEG, GIF and PNG are supported. There is no size restriction, though we recommend 280 X 60 for optimal display.
The logo is used in the following ways:
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On your custom landing page
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At the top of the openbadges.me side menu
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Within emails generated from your openbadges.me application
ICON
In addition to a logo, a smaller icon can be uploaded and used to further customise your openbadges.me. JPEG, GIF and PNG are supported. There is no restriction on the size of the icon, though we do recommend 35 X 35 for optimal display.
The icon is displayed in the following ways:
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As part of your browser tab heading
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At the top of the collapsed openbadges.me side menu
Customise openbadges.me
Look and Feel
Within the application 'System settings' area, on the main side menu, you can:
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Author your user welcome and badge issue email content
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Personalise the site look and feel with your organisational logo and colour branding
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Customise your openbadges.me landing page, with bespoke graphics and an organisational specific URL (Part of the white labelling package)
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Create and assign custom user roles to reflect how you want openbadges.me to work for you and your organisation
Within your personal 'Settings' area, located on the right hand corner of each screen, there are options for you to personalise your openbadges.me experience further by:
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Uploading a profile picture
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Giving yourself a custom username
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Some of the application system settings customisation options are only available to organisations who have certain openbadges.me subscription plans.
User Management
and Administrators
Organisations
Openbadges.me allows you to define and manage an organisational structure that may reflect your own organisation structure. As a starting point, the organisation name you used to register will have already been set-up for you as your first, top-level organisation.
Selecting "add organisation" will create a child organisation under the level you are at. This could be a team, department, faculty, office or region.
The advantage of creating and maintaining an organisation structure is it allows you to organise yourself into distinct badge issuers, whose badge issuing activity can be reported on separately.
Add organisation: The organisational structure is grown by adding other organisations into the structure. There is no limit to the number of organisations that can be added onto the hierarchy.
Remove organisation: At any point, an organisation can be removed from the hierarchy.
Edit organisation: The name and the description of an organisation can be amended and updated.
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Organisation, group and role assignment: Through the 'Edit user' function a user can be added, removed and transferred into any organisation or group within your organisation hierarchy and assigned any number of different roles.
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User summary: A summary view of each user presents data about their relationship with your organisation: Their group and organisation membership and roles, recently awarded badges, etc.
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Users
To create a new openbadges.me user, first go to the 'Users' area on the openbadges.me side menu. Then select 'Create user'. The creation of a user requires:
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Email address
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First name
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Last name
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Username
Optionally, you can choose to add an external identifier to the user, such as employee number, student id, customer reference ...etc. The user must be added into a least one organisation or group. For each group or organisation they are added into, they will be assigned a default role of user, unless you choose another available role.
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Clicking the 'Create user' button will send an email to the user asking them to verify their email address. As part of the email verification process, the user will be invited to create a password for their new openbadges.me account.
A user cannot be created using an email address that is already in use within the openbadges.me platform. Rather than creating the user, you will be presented with the option of adding the user into your openbadges.me space.
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Users are managed within the 'Users' area, located on the openbadges.me side menu.
The user listing can be ordered by name or creation date, ascending and descending. In addition, the users can be filtered by role, organisation or group.
Assigning Roles
Roles can only be assigned to any user created within your organisations openbadges.me space.
When a user is added into an organisation or group they must be assigned a role. A user can only be assigned one role per group or organisation. If a user belongs to multiple groups or organisations, they may hold hold multiple roles. For example, for Group A they may be a Badge Creator, while for Group B they are a Group Administrator.
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The assigned role can be one of the following:
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an organisational custom admin role
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a default openbadges.me admin role
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user (backpack holder/badge recipient)
Assigning a Role
To assign a user a role, you locate and select the user to edit within the openbadges.me 'Users' area.
You can change the role they are assigned for any existing groups or organisations they belong to.
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In addition, you can add them to a new group or organisation and assign them their role at the same time.
Bulk Actions
Users can be gathered together and managed in bulk. A collection of users can be deleted, transferred from one group into another, add into a group, removed from a group, all with a single action. Rather than repeatedly doing the same action for each individual user, a single management function can be applied against a cherry picked collection of users.
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