Steele Canyon Canvas Badging Pilot

February to April 2017. Instructional Designer.

This dedicated case study restores the narrative from my original portfolio. The work samples below come from that project.

Overview

In the 2015-2016 school year Steele Canyon High School offered its first online course, Advanced Placement Computer Science Principles (AP CSP). In Spring of 2017 a teacher of AP CSP wanted to develop a badge system for this course to fix the problem of students not turning their work in on time. The final product was added to the class curriculum for students to use. I, along with a fellow Instructional Designer, were tasked with creating the criteria for the badges, designing and implementing them into Canvas.

Audience

: High School Students taking AP CSP: 2016-2017

Responsibilities

: Instructional Design, Performance Analysis, Gamification, LMS Integration, Job Aid Creation

Tools Used

: Canvas LMS, Microsoft PowerPoint, Badgr

Analysis

The first thing we did was survey the students about what factors do or don’t motivate them to complete assignments on time. Unfortunately I don’t have access to the survey results, but here is the analysis we performed:

Design Process

We started by designing different types of badges and how the students would get them. We also needed to think about where in the course we needed to apply them. We followed the best practices of using badges as achievement symbols from the Accomplishment section of the Octalysis framework by Yu Kai Chou.

'On Time' Badge

'Narrin' the Web' Badge

'You're really good at this' Badge

Development

After researching and reviewing several sources, we decided to use Canvabadges and/or Badgr systems, which allow award badges to students based on their completion of course assignments. We tried to create badges to test them in Canvas, but it ran into following problems:

1) Canvabadges did not work in Canvas. In addition, this system is not actively being maintained and supported. The team switched to Badgr.

2) The badges were created in Badgr and added to Canvas. However, we found out that the  badges could not be given for completion of individual assignments. The badges can be awarded only to students who completed weekly modules.

To solve these problems, the team decided to make badges that award students in courses based on their completion of weekly course modules.

Implementation &

Evaluation

Once we have everything created, we implemented the badges into Canvas. We enrolled as students in AP CSP: 2016-2017 course to pilot the badges. After we submitted all assignments for the assigned week, we automatically got a badge through Badgr. In addition, we could view their badges and others by clicking the Badges icon on the bottom of the list on the left.

The Badgr badges created to award badges based on the completion of weekly course modules worked well. However, we together with the high school students decided to change the Clock badge to Pokemon badges to make badges more interesting and colorful. Unfortunately the program ended before we were able to get any feedback from the students about the badges, but we heard from the teacher that there was improvement in work being submitted on time.

Results & Takeaways

We created a guide for the teacher to use in the future or to share with co-teachers as well as a list of findings, recommendations and takeaways, as seen below:

Evidence Boundary

The badge-award workflow worked in the pilot. The teacher reported improvement in on-time work, but we did not receive direct student feedback or a quantified outcome before the project ended.