Picture retrieved from http://openmatt.org/2011/09/22/whats-your-elevator-pitch-for-badges/

Open Badges and their use for online informal or formal learning have been explored for a while. But it is not easy to hand-bake a badge and issue it manually. I tried to manually create one based on the instruction here: Open Badges: Want to Make Your Own Badges by Hand? Here’s How., but this post doesn’t include the process of Badge issuing and sharing. In general, to issue a Badge to certain learners with the set up of the criteria process of gaining a badge requires quite amount of coding, which is not an easy path. So, it is great news when I found out that Moodle finally released their newest version of Moodle 2.5 as of April 5th, 2013, and that includes the Open Badges function!

So here is the recorded process and tips during the installation of Moodle 2.5 and trying out the Badges function on my GoDaddy server:

Step 1: Download and Upload the Moodle Package

First of all, as of July 25th 2013, GoDaddy does not provide the latest version of Moodle installation. The version they have available right of this time is version 1.9.1. After finding out this, I had to remove the installed moodle and manually downloaded the version 2.5 pack from moodle.org.

Note: as of August 1st 2013, when I checked the latest stable version of Moodle package for download, there was a newer version of Moodle 2.5.1 which was made available right after I originally published this blog post. Oh well, this is technology, so we should not be surprised.

Step 2: Create a MySQL database for your moodle site

The next step was to create a MySQL database on your server. Moodle 2.5 requires the MySQL version of 5.5, so be aware of this. I named my database “moodlebadges”.

Step 3: configure your config.php file

After downloading and uploading the package to my server, I started to install it via the website interface. That was when I realized that this version 2.5 does not have the config.php file, which was vital for the installation. Hence I went back to the version 1.9.1 and copied a config.php file and then pasted it into the 2.5 folder.

The next step was to make sure everything inside of that config.php file is correct in terms of your Moodle database connection. This included setting up your database log info, and paths such as your dirroot, dirdoc correctly.

Step 4: Install your moodle site

And now if everything has been set up correctly, you should be able to go to your moodle web address and start installing with the web interface. For my moodle site, the address is blog.tech4teaching.net/moodle

You will first see a screen asking you to choose the language like this (or it could be slightly different depends on your Moodle version):

The next screen is something like this:

Then you will just have to follow the instructions on the screen and finish your installation.

At last, you will see a screen with the Navigation bar and Administration bar on the left, something like this:

Click to expand “Site Administration”, here is the place you set up the site appearance, choose the site theme, turn on/off certain functions.

In my next post, I will talk about how to turn on the Badge function on course level and how to config a course Badge.