Using Canvas Badges's leaderboard in Canvas

Before enabling a Leaderboard, an instructor must first configure Canvas Badges to automatically award badges in the course.

What is a course Leaderboard?

Canvas Badges's course Leaderboard is a privacy-aware method of allowing students to track each other's progress through a Canvas course learning pathway – adding an element of gamification to their learning. The leaderboard scrolls and paginates through the full list of students and course objectives.

Enabling the Canvas Badges course Leaderboard in Canvas

Once enabled, instructors and students will be able to access the Leaderboard, showing course progress sorted by which students have earned the most badges. Teachers can view students' real names, but students will only see the randomly-generated animal nicknames for each other by default.

Instructors who have the Canvas Badges app in their courses have a Leaderboard tab. The Leaderboard is disabled by default, but instructors can enable it for their course by checking Enable Leaderboard.

Instructor's Leaderboard view Here is what the Leaderboard looks like in Canvas for an instructor. Instructors also have access to an Objectives tab (students do not). Note that each student's real name is listed above their nickname.

leaderboard

Instructors can also search for specific students by entering text into the search field.

The animal nickname will remain the same throughout the duration of the course unless a teacher or instructor manually selects to refresh it with a new name. Animal nicknames are not persistent across courses.

Student Leaderboard

Student's Leaderboard view Here is what the Leaderboard looks like in Canvas for a student. Note the logged-in student in this example ("Kelly Bob") will see their real name listed above their nickname. The student is ranked second for having only earned 3 of 4 available badges.

Students will see their own real name in the Leaderboard, but only an animal nickname for all of the other students. If a student de-selects the Keep my name private checkbox, other students will see that student listed in the Leaderboard by their real name. The animal nickname will remain the same throughout the duration of the course unless a teacher or instructor manually selects to refresh it with a new name. Animal nicknames are not persistent across courses.

leaderboard

Canvas Badges does not respect course sections. Progress will only be shown for the overall course.