Open Badges for Nodeschool

[finnp]

Hello there,

I was recently thinking about how Nodeschool could embody Open Badges and gladfully saw that there were already a few discussions about it.

While it would be nice if there would be a mechanism to automatically issue badges for the cli courses, I thought maybe first there could be something added for the offline events.

I think it would be a cool if participants of a Nodeschool event would get a badge afterwards (maybe even the current logo as it already looks like a badge). For hosting of the badges and assertions I would suggest using GitHub Pages. The organizers of a local event could then be granted access to that repo or be added to the organisation and simply add the new badges to the repo.

I made a test for this in this repo here. I also tested a small script for sharing the badges easily: http://www.finnpauls.de/openbadges-host/share/#badge-example/1 . This just takes the location of the badge in the hash part of the url, loads the proper image and allows people to simply add it to their backpack.

Also I wrote a CLI for managing the badges and simply add new ones without writing the JSON files all by yourself: https://github.com/finnp/openbadges-issuer

Another cool think would be to design something like a GitHub Fork Badge and create a tutorial for making a pull request for adding yourself to the repo (similiar to the git-it workshop, could be a small challenge after completing that). That badge would show that people are able to do a pull request and the learner would be more confident going through the GitHub Flow (= win).

Would love to hear your opinion.

Best, Finn

[mikeal]

A few things I would love to see:

• A leaderboard (@olizilla @alanshaw @achingbrain did something like this locally for the nodebot workshop at NodeConf)
• Integration w/ GitHub rather than Mozilla Backpack. One of the reasons we use this discussions repo for answering questions is because it onboards people in to the tools the broader open source community is participating in and that they'll end up using as they extend their education beyond just NodeSchool and start finding issues in open source modules.

[elf-pavlik]

@jlord @substack we consider with @finnp issuing badges for participants of NodeSchool workshop @jsfest.berlin Finn already has some issuing mechanisms but we can't handle designing graphics for particular lessons. If someone could help with designing graphics for 5 badges, one for each 5 core concept, it would help a lot! ping @brianloveswords

[elf-pavlik]

besides per lesson badges, we could also create 2 generic badges

• nodeschool learner
• nodeschool mentor

maybe later with variants 5x 10x 25x 50x for those who participated more than once

[finnp]

Substack made a bunch of hexagon stickers for the website: http://scratch.substack.net/badges.svg. Those are perfect for Open Badegs.

I currently think we could set up a /openbadges repo, where we host the badges on the gh-pages branch. This way every mentor could issue badges to the learners. We could include a How To there in the readme file, so that people know how to issue badges.

Also we could have the following workflow to issue badges for people who finish something after an event or who are not participating at all:

1. They upload all their solutions in a public GitHub Repo
2. They create an issue on the OpenBadges branch with a link to the repo.
3. They provide their email adress or a hash with salt for their adress (we can add a how to for that too)
4. We issue them a badge.

Alternatively people could even fork and make a PR for their own badges. But I think that shouldn't be mandatory.

Also this way we keep things central, but not every chapter has to participate in it and related Notifications will be separate from the Website or discussions.

Best, Finn

[elf-pavlik]

badges require certain degree of trust, hosted version depends on trust for the domain hosting assertions. i wonder if we could use something like badges.nodeschoo.io/{UUID} so that those who trust this domain can recognize them as valid claims

[finnp]

Yes, if we host it on /openbadges, the trust url would be nodeschool.io. I think that is trustworthy :)

[elf-pavlik]

subdomain, path, whatever works better for deploying :smile: we could also for each lesson publish a list of issued badges which may make them more valued!

[martinheidegger]

Just thinking out loud: How about an table that has following columns:

ID | Date | Workshopper | Badgee | Verifier

(Badgee: person that received the badge. Verfier: github account of person that vouches for the badge. Probably a mentor)

We have the data publicly listed and mentors get access to them. When a badge is registered we can write the ID using a marker pen on the physical badge and people can look it up online.

Does that sound like a good idea?

[martinheidegger]

The badge system has been discussed in https://github.com/nodeschool/organizers/issues/126#issuecomment-71232680 and I think we can safely say that the voices are very complex. How about putting a recommendation somewhere that: If some company/organisation starts a badge program and we like it that we will feature it on the homepage?

[martinheidegger]

Closing issue (other issues with similar topic are open).