CSC/ECE 517 Spring 2016/Badging System

Introduction

Much like physical badges in the army and youth scout troops, digital based badges are an assessment and credentialing mechanism that is housed and managed online. Badges are designed to make visible and validate learning in both formal and informal settings, and hold the potential to help transform where and how learning is valued. In other words, badges may be used in order to set goals and motivations for students and reward and may help to improve their academic scores. Badges can also be considered as a way to reward student’s success. Moreover, badges can be used by teachers for alternative assessment techniques.

One request for the Expertiza system is to add a badging system as a way to measure student performance. Expertiza will take advantage of the motivations created from badges by awarding students with new badges based off providing a variety of factors within the Expertiza system. Some of these badges include: achieving a top percentage of scores in an assignment, achieving a high peer review score, performing well overall in a course and other manual accomplishments deemed necessary by the teaching staff for a course. Instead of implementing the whole badging system, we will call an existing web service (probably Credly) and integrate it with Expertiza.

Database Design

Column	Type	Comment
badge_id	int	Primary key. Auto-generated
user_id	int	Referenced from users table
course_id	int	Referenced from courses table
assignment_id	int	Referenced from assignments table
is_course_badge	boolean	Whether badge is a course-badge or individual-badge
strategy	string	Describes the strategy of awarding

Design Pattern

1. MVC – The project is implemented in Ruby on Rails that uses MVC architecture. It separates an application’s data model, user interface, and control logic into three distinct components (model, view and controller, respectively).
2. Dry Principle – We are trying to reuse the existing functionalities in Expertiza, thus avoiding code duplication. Whenever possible, code modification based on the existing classes, controllers, or tables will be done instead of creating the new one.