09 August 2013, 0:22

Hi,

We have been developing issuer and displayer tools for Open Badges and we are happy to share our Open Badges displayer for Mahara:

https://mahara.org/user/ajk/open-badge-displayer

We will soon start the work on a plugin project for issuing badges in Mahara. This plugin is a part of a bigger project named Open Badge Factory partly funded by  the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation. It’s a cloud-based service, which enables organizations to create and manage their Open Badges in a centralized repository, while issuing them from different systems. We are open to collaboration, so if you are interested, you are welcome to visit our site, http://openbadgefactory.com

09 August 2013, 2:41

Eric,

Thanks for this.

The only issue I see is that (for us at least) the email address for each student in Mahara is their college email address pulled over from Moodle to save the users having to manage that, whereas Mozilla recommend using an external email address.

Your plugin, however, effectively asks the user to then add another email to their Mahara system, which will also mean that all emails will go to both addresses etc.. and for some users (e.g. lecturers), this could be tens (or more) of emails a day duplicated.

Is this correct, or have I misunderstood the '2. The email address used with backpack must be one of the verified addresses in Mahara profile.' step?

Thanks

09 August 2013, 11:14

Hi Wullie,

I haven't looked at this plugin yet in much detail, but as far as emails go, a user can have many email addresses stored in their Profile, but only one of them is actually the "primary email" that Mahara sends email to.

Whenever a user tries to add a new email address to their profile, they get sent a verification email to prove that they actually have control of that email address. So, that's what the "verified addresses" is about. At any time, a user can change their primary email to be any of their verified addresses.

I believe the main purpose of allowing a user to have mulitple email addresses, was mostly to just let them show them on their profile. But it can come in handy occasionally for purposes like this, where an email address is used as a form of identification. :)

Cheers,

Aaron

19 August 2013, 22:13

Hi Aaron,

Thanks for clarifying how the Mahara e-mails work. When I first saw the details for this badge displayer tool I thought it could be an issue as users won't necessarily have their Mozilla Badge account tied to their institutional email (in fact that's something to avoid - when I last had a discussion about the persona login tool tied to the backpack it wasn't possible to change the e-mail associated with it). It does mean institutions might end up with personal data (email addresses) from staff and students which they might not want to be responsible for - but not sure there's an easy option around that.

Regards, Gordon.

20 August 2013, 8:45

Hello Gordon,

Why would an institution be responsible for the personal email of staff / students that they use to connect to their backpack?

While you can have multiple different email addresses associated with one Persona account, I could not connect with a second one to my existin backpack, but a new account was opened (as you had mentioned in other words). That's a bit of a drawback esp. when you can't change your email address. I suspect the latter is not possible because then you could sell your badges to others because Mozilla does not have a way of verifying that the second address belongs to the same person...

signjk

09 August 2013, 11:26

Hi Eric,

Cool, I've been hearing a lot of buzz about Open Badges lately, so it's good to see a working plugin for Mahara for it.  I've added your plugin to the Plugin listing wiki page as well: https://wiki.mahara.org/index.php/Plugins#Blocktype_Plugins

Which Mahara plugin type were you thinking of using for the badge issuer plugin? Just off the top of my head, I'm not sure if it actually matches any of the existing plugin types that well... perhaps the Interaction type is the closest, if you were going to make badge issuance be something that can happen when a person submits a page to a group for evaluation.

Cheers,

Aaron

10 August 2013, 0:43

Hi Aaron,

Thank you for adding the plugin to the wiki. Well to be honest we have not yet thought about the type of plugin this issuer tool would match with. As you mentioned, the interaction plugin could be a solution …

I think that it would make sense to issue badges for group participants, but also to single users for example as a result of evaluation of pages or collections.

Cheers,

Eric

18 August 2013, 18:09

Hi Aaron and Eric,

I think it would still be a blocktype plugin because a block is placed on a page that displays the badges. It's then up to the blocktype whether it is only available for an individual user or also in a group.

Cheers

Kristina

09 August 2013, 15:24

Hi Eric,

Naturally we're very interested in how you are approaching this and also collaborating. Ultimately I see Mahara as a backpack provider also.

cheers
Richard

10 August 2013, 1:19

Hi Richard,

Developing a federation system for backpack is a task, which is in our OBF project’s roadmap. We will start to work on it when Mozilla will define what technology they want to use for implementing this feature.

The backpack federation will make possible to have local backpacks (why not in Mahara) but badges will be replicated so that they will be accessible to displayers from one place, the Mozilla backpack.

Cheers

Eric