“Achievements”, or badges as they are sometimes known, are a great way to motivate students and encourage some friendly competition via ‘gamification‘ techniques.

If your students have ever played a computer game (most of them, probably on a phone these days!) they will be familiar with the concepts of rewards for completing certain tasks e.g. collect 50 coins in a minute, or find X amount of treasure.

You can apply these techniques to elements of your course if you implement a skills ‘check list’. A simple example is described below.

Gamification Example

As part of your course in employability and transferable skills you have asked your students to do the following:

1. Create a CV in eFolio and LinkedIn.
2. Create an externally facing ePortfolio to promote yourself to employers
3. Draft a Covering Letter for a job
4. Give peer feedback on 3 other students covering letters
5. Attend a mock interview

Example achievements you could create are

a) If students have completed task 1 and 2, they get an achievement called ‘Professional Presence’

b) If students complete tasks 3, 4 and 5 they get another achievement called ‘Ready for Lord Sugar’

The achievement names and  images could be anything you wish, but making them light hearted often encourages students to engage more.

More serious examples include the Faculty of Medicine packaging together some key practical procedures skills together to give students a ‘HCA Practitioner’ achievement.

For more information, or for an informal chat about how you can use achievements in your course please contact CITE.

How to setup your achievements

Your achievements are found in your ‘skills’ admin page. The process is as follows.

1. Create a set of skills associated with this achievement
2. In the skills admin page click the ‘Achievements’ link
3. Click the ‘Add new achievement’ link and give your achievement a name and description.
4. Finally tick the skills that students are required to complete (have competence) to achieve this award.

If you wish to add a custom achievement image please contact CITE via serviceline and we will be happy to work with you to create a professional looking award.

Achievements FAQ

Does eFolio achievements tie in with mozilla open badges?

Not currently, although this is a future project we will look at if achievements in eFolio is popular. http://openbadges.org/

I need some help designing my achievement ‘image’ logo

Get in touch with serviceline and someone from CITE can help you out.