Best practice forum (Archived)

Implementation of the Mozilla OpenBadges spec

Hi,

We're currently looking at the use of Badges for recognising skills of staff. In the Mozilla OpenBadges specification, there is reference to a property called AlignmentObject (https://github.com/mozilla/openbadges-specification/blob/master/Assertion/latest.md#alignmentobject).

Being able to show the alignment of our Badges to external standards would be useful.

Has the AlignmentObject property been included in the Totara Badges implementation? (I can't see it anywhere).

If not, is there any intention to include this property?

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Hi Maurice,

Sorry for the delayed reply.

When badges were initially developed, Mozilla hasn't finished this specification yet. We just recently moved to it which should be available in Totara 2.6. So, there hasn't been much work done to add new features of this specification.

It is possible to extend badges definition to include alignments, but I am not sure how this should work yet... As I understand, a badge can have multiple alignments. What are the required fields of these alignments (is it just name, url, description, as per Mozilla spec)? I would imagine this as a separate tab where user can add this kind of information. Any more ideas would be appreciated, and I will try to have a look at this at some point.

Thanks!

Yuliya

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Hi Yuliya,

I guess there are a number of ways we could use the Alignment object. At a high level, our badges are aligned with SFIA (Skills Framework for the Information Age) so being able to indicate that would be useful. Frequently a badge will align with more than one SFIA skill set, so being able to have multiple alignments could be useful. However, how granular is it sensible to go. The actual skill alignments could be added to the description which would remove the need for multiple alignment objects - for very little loss of fidelity (imo).

One thing that would be good, is for the description box to have text formatting capability. I have experimented and the text box does accept and render html (bold, italic, lists etc) but this has to be 'coded' manually. I can't see anything in the Mozilla spec that limits the description contents to plain text. I'll upload one of my html coded descriptions to the backpack and see what happens.

Thanks,

Maurice

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