Open Badges are all the rave at this year’s iMoot because Moodle allows you to earn badges. This functionality is new in Moodle 2.5 that was just released last week.

Mahara will be a displayer of badges once others than Mozilla can also be badges backpacks. We hope that this code will be released soon so we can implement it into the next release.

For the time being however, there is a quick and dirty hack to show off your badges in Mahara by using an iFrame. Here’s what you have to do.

1. Ask your site administrator to add “backpack.openbadges.org/share” to the list of allowed iFrames. This can be done from Mahara 1.6 on. If you are on Mahara 1.5, your site administrator needs to delve into the code to add the URL.
2. Go to your Mozilla Backpack and create a collection for the badges that you would like to display.
3. Make this collection public.
4. Copy the URL of your public collection and create an iFrame code around it. An easy tool is the Online iFrame generator. Just paste your URL in there, choose the settings you’d like to have, and off you go. I chose scrolling and a width and height of 800px.
5. Copy the resulting iFrame code.
   Mine looked like this:

   <iframe src=”http://backpack.openbadges.org/share/cb5f7bf2cfcfbf0bfcb7470f2798bb67/” style=”border:0px #FFFFFF none;” name=”myiFrame” scrolling=”yes” frameborder=”1″ marginheight=”0px” marginwidth=”0px” height=”800px” width=”800px”></iframe>

   You can use this iFrame code and just replace the URL which is displayed in bold.

6. Create a page in your Mahara portfolio and set the layout to 1 column only.
7. Either use the “Text box / note” block or the “External content” block to embed your iFrame. I am going to use the “External content” block because it’s easier. 🙂
8. Paste your iFrame code into the block, give it a heading and you are done.
9. Save the block. Your badges now appear in your page.

For an example, check out my iMoot badges page.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.