Certificates
Design completion certificates and set when learners earn them
Certificates are issued automatically when a learner reaches the certificate element in a course. You design the certificate once, and every learner who gets there receives their own copy.
Adding a certificate to a course
- Open your course in the course builder
- Add a Certificate element to the course map
- Click it to open the design editor
Where you place the element decides when it is earned: a learner receives the certificate when they reach it. Put it at the end of the course for completion, or after a test if passing that test is the requirement.
Designing the certificate
Starting from a style
The editor ships ten starting designs – Classic, Elegant, Simple, Modern, Minimalist, Corporate, Professional, Academic, Creative and Colorful. Each is a full layout you can then change; none of them locks anything.
What you can place
The certificate canvas takes text, images, shapes and a QR code, positioned freely. Use it for your logo, a signature image, a border, or anything else your organisation's certificates carry.
Fields that fill themselves in
Four values are substituted per learner when the certificate is issued:
| Field | What it becomes |
|---|---|
| Learner name | The learner's full name |
| Course name | The name of the course |
| Achievement date | The date they earned it |
| Valid until | The expiry date, when the certificate expires |
Drop these into the design and each learner's copy carries their own values.
Expiry
A certificate can be set to expire after a period. When it does, the learner's certificate is marked expired – useful for compliance training that has to be retaken annually.
What learners get
A learner who earns a certificate sees it in their profile, with its date and expiry, and can download it from there.
Practical advice
- Design at the size it will be read. Most certificates are looked at on a screen and printed rarely – keep the text large enough to survive both.
- Put the logo where a logo goes. A certificate is a document people recognise by shape; unusual layouts read as unofficial.
- Say what was completed, not just that something was. "Completed: Forklift Safety Basics" is worth more to the person filing it than "Certificate of Achievement".
- Preview before publishing. The editor shows the design with sample values, which is the fastest way to catch a field that will overflow with a long name.
- Decide expiry deliberately. An expiry date is a promise that someone will chase the retake; set it where that is actually true.