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Badge Provider Integration

In order to award badges, you'll need to integrate with a third-party badge service. We've chosen to create an integration with Canvas Badgr, which is a free service that provides a simple API for awarding badges. KinesinLMS leverages that API when issuing a badge assertion for a student for something like passing a course. The BadgrBadgeService class implements these calls to the Badgr API.

If you want to use a different badge service, you'll need to create a new subclass of the BadgeService class to implement the new service, and potentailly update or subclass BadgeProvider to match. You'll also need to add a new name and value pair to BadgeProviderType enum to represent your integration.

Setting Up an Account at Badgr.com

You can create a free accont at Badgr.com here: https://badgr.com/auth/signup

After you do, use the Badgr.com admin website to create an "issuer" for your KinesinLMS site. This issuer will own the badge assertions you create.

You'll need the issuer "ID" in the next step. To get it, go to the "public" page for the issuer and then click "View JSON" button at the bottom of the page. This will show you the JSON for the issuer, and the "id" field is the full path for the issuer ID. It will look something like this: https://api.badgr.io/public/issuers/(some long ID string)

That final long string is the issuer "ID" and that's what you'll need in the next step. So copy just that string (not the whole URL) and hold on to it for the next step.

Setting up the Badge Provider

Once you've created a new Badgr.com account and an issuer, you can set up your Badge Provider in the KinesinLMS admin panel.

The first step is to set the two environment variables for your login credentials: BADGE_PROVIDER_USERNAME=(your username) BADGE_PROVIDER_PASSWORD=(your password)

These should be secret, that's why we set them directly in the environment rather than storing them in the database.

Then create a Badge Provider in the KinesinLMS management panel. Here's how:

  1. Go to the Badge Providers admin page: https://(your app url)/management/badge_provider/
  2. Add "My Badgr" or something like that as the name of the provider.
  3. Set the "type" to "Badgr".
  4. Create a slug for this provider. badgr is a good choice.
  5. Set the "api url" to https://api.badgr.io/
  6. Create a random "salt" string. If you don't have a reliable way for creating a random string, try typing the number keys real crazy like.
  7. Add the issuer ID from the last step in the "Issuer entity ID" field

You can leave the "Access token" and "Refresh token" fields blank for now. They will be filled in automatically when the badge provider first accesses the Badgr API.

Creating Badge Classes

Now that you have a connection with Badgr, you can set up what are called "badge classes" to represent achievements. Badge classes are represented in KinesinLMS with the BadgeClass model.

Read the Creating Badge Classes documentation for more information on how to set up a badge class for course completion.