Utilization of Digital Badges to Improve Learners’ Retention in Online Course

Learners’ retention is an essential factor that affects the completion rate of online learning in universities. Learners with high retention have a preponderant probability of completing the course with satisfactory results. The development of online courses using digital badges is a strategy to increase learners’ retention. Student retention is a matter that is often found in online courses or lectures at the college level. One of the actions taken to increase student retention is the use of digital badges. This study aims to increase learner retention through digital badges in the Learning Management System (LMS), which in this research is using Moodle. The research respondents were college students involved in the online course “Remote Sensing for Water Resources Management.” The research method used is an experiment comparing courses that use digital badges and courses that do not use them. The research data was obtained from log data on the Moodle and analyzed by K-Means Clustering technique to obtain three categories of learner retention: high retention, medium retention, and low retention. The results showed that the use of digital badges can increase learners’ retention. Based on these results, this study recommends using digital badges to develop online courses or online lectures.