Cross-courses badge award

Question

Hi all,

I believe I'm not the first one to ask this question but I couldn't find the right answer. I’d like to check what the best practice is for setting up a multi-course badge in Brightspace. The use case is:

* Each learner earns a badge upon completing an individual course.
* Once they complete a defined sequence (or possibly any order) of those courses, they receive a “super-badge.”

Is this achievable within Brightspace natively, or would it require a workaround (e.g. external badge management, program-level structure, or Intelligent Agents)?

Thanks

Colt.K.2845 · Answer

Hi Olly,

Thanks for the clarification. I still think this is a fairly common scenario in higher education—especially for programs where students need to complete a combination of mandatory and elective courses to earn an undergraduate or postgraduate degree.

I’m curious if there’s a pattern that most HE institutions adopt for this.

Olly.Fayers@d2l.com · Answer

I see where you're coming from. You would need a group for each course, so it's manageable if you only have a few courses that this super-award comes from, but it becomes trickier to scale.

I'm not an expert in the API side of things, but I think it's possible to issue awards via API, which means you could potentially engineer a dataflow that checks who has received certain combinations of badges and issues awards accordingly.

In terms of your question, that's a tricky one. I think I'll flag it to the D2L folks in your region and see if they have any ideas. In my experience, it has come up occasionally as an ask, but I'm not sure that there's a standard approach. In higher education, I think the most common thing would be that the data flows back into a Student Information System, and it's that system which tracks achievement across different courses. In corporate, I'm not so sure what the typical approach would be if there is one.

Colt.K.2845 · Answer

Hi @Olly.F.893

Thanks for sharing the idea — it’s creative, but I have some concerns about this approach. Using Intelligent Agents to manage enrolments into multiple groups feels like it could quickly create a lot of unnecessary groups, which might be difficult to maintain at scale. More importantly, it seems that the validity and authenticity of the award would depend entirely on group membership, rather than the learner’s earned achievements. That doesn’t feel aligned with the design principle of badges and awards.

A related question: how are other customers worldwide handling this use case? I would imagine multi-course awards and compulsory–elective course designs are quite common in both higher education and corporate learning. Is there a more standard or recommended approach that others are following?

Regards,