With the Blackboard achievements tool, you can provide this kind of incentive by designing a badge system to encourage your students to explore and participate more.
You can award badges for the completion of a project, mastery of a skill, or levels of experience. A collection of badges can represent the key learning milestones that have been met. They can show a complete view of a person’s skills and achievements.
You can also award badges for skills and knowledge acquired outside of the classroom setting, such as:
Basically, you can allow students to combine a diverse set of badges to tell the story of their accomplishments, in and out of class. Together, you can create badges to spotlight skills that will help students work toward a specific goal. Whether the goal is to gain admittance into graduate school or finding the perfect job, you can collaborate with your students to design the pathways.
When students are allowed a voice in the process that unlocks the access to what they want, you may see a spike in their motivation for additional learning. You want to facilitate your students' "what if" thinking stage. Allow them the flexibility to be innovative and determine what they value and recognize as important to their own educations.
Achievements appear in the content area and in the achievements tool.
An achievement is not be presented to students in the student view of the achievements tool until a trigger rule is defined and a reward is selected.
For an achievement, you can define one or more rules that will trigger the release of the reward. You must define at least one rule.
The achievements tool is built upon the content adaptive release technology of Blackboard Learn. This currently includes the following:
Setting a Display After date means that students cannot earn the reward before that date, even if they have already met the criteria. Display After is not the same as an end date and is not a deadline.
To create a rule, name it, and set each criterion necessary for fulfilling the requirements of the achievement. You can create additional criteria for grade and review status by clicking the add functions.
If students must complete four exams in your course and have a final grade of 70%, you will create the following:
In circumstances where different criteria are possible, click Add Another Rule to create another rule. For example, you have a group of learners who need accommodation and have different performance requirements to receive the reward.
To manually award an achievement, use the membership criteria options to select the recipients. For example, you can award a mayor badge for leading discussions.
Click Select Reward to continue.
On the final page, choose the reward. Depending on the achievement type, you can choose from different options.
You can preview how a certificate will appear to students. It includes the issuing institution as specified by the administrator, the user’s name, the course name, and the date the criteria of the achievement were met.
For badges, you can select an image from the catalog or upload a custom image. An uploaded badge image is available for reuse within your course. If you uploaded an image and need to remove it, you can delete the file from Course Files in the achievements directory. Uploaded images are automatically resized.
The issuer name is pre-populated based on the administrator’s settings. If appropriate, and allowed by the administrator, you can modify the issuer name. You can specify an expiry date for the badge and, if allowed by the administrator, the badge can optionally be available for publishing to recipients’ Mozilla Badge Backpacks.
Select Submit to issue the achievement.
If you choose to delete an achievement which has already been earned by a student, the associated reward will also be deleted.
In the Achievements tool under Course Tools in the Control Panel, you can see all of the achievements defined in your course, as well as a count of recipients for each of the achievements.
Clicking the Recipients link shows details about those students who have earned each of the achievements. Clicking a student's name will present that student's view of the My Achievements page.
The Date Received lets instructors know when the students saw the notification of their earning of the achievement. Typically this is immediately upon earning, but in cases where instructor grading or manual awarding was involved, the date received is when a student was shown their achievement reward.
Students can access the achievements tool on the Student Tools page, from a tool link on the course menu, or from a link in a content area.
You can see a student's My Achievements view by clicking a student's name in the Recipients pane. The page will appear exactly as it will to that student.
To learn more about how students use this tool, see Blackboard's Achievements »2.
The content items that you create with the achievements tool can be aligned to goals. These appear in the Goal Coverage reports.
In the content area, access an achievement's contextual menu and select Add Alignments.
Achievements are not handled by these processes as a distinct object. They are dependent on both content and adaptive release rules. If only content is copied between courses, the trigger rules will be lost. If content is not included in a copy or export/import, achievements are not captured. As long as both content and adaptive release rules are selected in the process, achievements will be handled properly.
Source: Blackboard Help »3
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