Dear Students,
We have been made aware of an issue that affects courses offering badges and encouraging connection to external backpacks.
If your course does not issue badges or if you do not sync externally issued badges from a backpack into your Moodle profile then you can ignore this message.
The Persona authentication system, which is used to sign into the Open Badges backpack, has been shut down by Mozilla with effect from the end of December 2016. At the moment Moodle has no alternative authentication with Open Badges backpack or any other integration with other backpack providers. This means that users will no longer be able to pull external badges into their Moodle profile or push badges earned in Moodle to their backpack.
You can still manually download badges out of Moodle and then upload them into a backpack but there is no equivalent function in Moodle to allow you to upload external badges into your profile.
As per Moodle’s recommendation, we are going to switch off this functionality within Moodle to remove any confusion for users. We will inform users when Moodle offers an alternative backpack integration.
Wesley