The Chicago Summer of Learning - all the bits and pieces
Following the launch of Open Badges v1.0 back in March 14 at the Digital Media and Learning conference, the Open Badges team has been heads down working with the city of Chicago, the MacArthur Foundation, Hive Chicago, Digital Youth Network among others on the Chicago Summer of Learning initiative.
The Chicago Summer of Learning brings together youth-serving organizations, museums, cultural institutions, philanthropists within Chicago to support young people in exploring the themes of Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Mathematics (STEAM). All the learning that is undertaken by youth is captured and recognized in the form of badges that are used to communicate back to schools and employers in the fall.
This city-wide initiative has provided an opportunity for the Open Badges team to test new features and functionalities that we hope to loop into the core product in coming months. The following is a list and explanation of these new features and functionalities that we are excited to build out further and bring to the wider Open Badges community.
1. A backpack that supports children under 13
The reference implementation of an Open Badges backpack that we have built, i.e. the Mozilla Backpack, currently does not support youth under 13 in order to meet the requirements of the Children's Online Privacy and Protection Act.
We have been fully aware that a Backpack that is unable to support under 13 youth is limiting. We knew there was no question about us having to support youth under 13 as part of the Chicago Summer of Learning initiative.
This meant we would need to track user birth dates and provide 2 different experiences accordingly.
The over 13 youth backpack would act just like the Mozilla Backpack, enabling share capability and user volition without parental oversight.
Meanwhile the under 13 youth backpack would have no integration with existing social media thereby lacking share functionality. However it would have a robust parental notification system to ensure parents and guardians are able to maintain clear oversight over their children's activities.
We have created the date of birth gate check which takes the learner down 2 different paths within the Chicago Summer of Learning experience, depending on whether they are under 13 or not, which is something we hope to loop back into the core Open Badges product offering.
2. Open Badger https://badge.chicagosummeroflearning.org/
Open Badger is an open source badge issuing tool we created last year to help Mozilla webmaker create and issue badges. Chicago has since become the 2nd client to use this badge issuing software.
This provided an opportunity for us to scale up the features of Open Badger as Chicago badges needed to be created and issued at an entirely different scale. For instance, webmaker was simply one "organization" client, meanwhile we had nearly 100 unique Chicago organizations providing a variety of programs that each issued badges. While there were a total of 12 webmaker badges, there were a total of 442 unique Chicago Summer of Learning badges.
While creating and issuing 12 webmaker badges may have been feasible manually, that was an untenable solution for CSOL badge creation and issuance.
We developed a data entry admin panel to input organization detail, program detail and badge detail and created the necessary among these 3 pieces of information.
We developed a badge issuing admin panel that allows instructors of organizations to
* access and issue the appropriate badge to a deserving learner via email
* generate simple claim codes
* create claim code badges that are printable that can be easily distributed at live, in-person events
We created badge recommendation logic such that when a learner earned a particular badge, the external Chicago Summer of Learning site could call that API end point to generate learner tailored recommendations on site.
These are just several of the core pieces that were developed as part of Open Badger for CSOL. We're excited to see how these pieces can be of used to benefit the larger open badges community.
3. Aestimia https://assess.chicagosummeroflearning.org/
Aestimia is a badge assessment tool. In Chicago Summer of Learning, it was important to ensure there were plenty of online, self-paced learning activities for youth. In order for the learner to earn any of these online, self-paced badges, they would have to go through the activity and apply for the badge by submitting evidence and reflections.
Once a badge was submitted, it would go into a badge application queue that is accessible by selected mentors. The badge application review process is enabled through Aestimia.
Mentors log on to the assessment tool and see a list of badge applications that are in need of review. Mentors open up each badge application one by one, review the evidence and reflections submitted by the learner against a pre-determined rubric and provide feedback. Depending on whether the earner who submitted the application is < 13 or not, mentor's feedback is a pre-canned message selected from a drop down menu or free form text.
Additional capabilities are being built out to help mentors understand how many badge applications are in need of review and to set goals.
4. Badge studio http://badgestudio.chicagosummeroflearning.org/
Badge studio is a web-based tool that helps anyone to easily create a badge design. This is something that's been in high demand in the community as many organizations don't have a visual designer on staff. For CSOL, streamlining badge design was critical due to the high volume of badges that needed to be designed with minimal resources.
It was agreed that badges that were part of the Chicago Summer of Learning would have a cohesive look and feel. As such, the badge design tool is intended to be templatized.
However we can easily genericize any Chicago branding and extend the services to be more inclusive beyond the Chicago initiative.
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I'm omitting a lot of details up top including all the backend work that went into developing these additional tools and services. There was a lot of heavy lifting that went into building these out that do not end up presenting themselves visually to the end user.
Next step for us is to modularize all the code we created for these tools so they can be repurposed to fulfill the needs of the community. Stay tuned for more.