Software Architectures for Implementing Achievement Badges - Practical Experiences

There are multiple commercial and non-commercial products available to integrate gamification aspects to existing services. Some of these are platform dependent whilst others are more general purpose. Commercial systems come with some problems - for example, lack of control and privacy issues. To avoid these problems, we created two iterations of badge systems and tested both of them on large courses (ca. 300 students each). In this paper, we present these systems and evaluate their merits and flaws. Based on our experiences, we present design principles on how to implement badge systems to existing online learning environments.