Give certificates for a course

A course can give each student who completes it a certificate of completion. Each certificate has a code, such as ABCD-EFGH-JKMN, a PDF, and a page at /certificates/ABCD-EFGH-JKMN that anyone with the code can open to check it.

Turn certificates on

Open the course's Settings and turn on Certificate on completion in the Certificate band. Anyone who can edit the course can change it. Preview certificate in the same band opens a sample PDF in a new tab, with "Student name" and today's date. Survey on completion, also in that band, offers a published Form from Personal or the team to each student who completes the course, and links it from the email about completing it.

From then on, a student who completes the course will get a certificate, and the email about completing the course will link to it. A student completes a course when every required lesson is complete; see When course lessons open, and how long students keep access. Students who completed the course before certificates were turned on will not get one automatically. Issue theirs from their page, as described below.

A student whose email address is not confirmed yet gets the certificate once they confirm it. Until then their course home asks them to confirm the address.

The design and the signer

Every course of a school uses the same certificate. A team admin sets it in the Certificates band of Courses › Settings:

• Design: Classic, Modern or Plain. Each uses your school's logo and colour.
• Signed by and Signer's title: the name and title printed at the foot. A certificate with no signer has neither.
• Signature: a PNG or JPEG picture of a signature from Your images, shown above the signer's name. Remove signature takes it off new certificates.
• Valid for: No end, 6 months, 1 year, 2 years or 3 years. A certificate with an end shows the date it expires, and its page says Expired after that date.

Changes apply to certificates issued from now on. A certificate already issued keeps the design, signer and end date it was issued with.

The PDF is one landscape page: Letter for a school whose time zone is in the Americas, Hawaii or the Philippines, and A4 everywhere else. It shows the student's name, the course, the school, the date, the signature and signer, the code, and the address where the certificate can be checked.

What a certificate's page shows

The page shows the student's name, the course, the school and the date, and whether the certificate is Valid, Expired or Revoked. It shows nothing else about the student. A valid certificate's page has Download PDF and Add to LinkedIn profile. The page is not listed by search engines.

Anyone with a code can also type it at /certificates, in capitals or lower case, with or without spaces or dashes. Too many wrong codes from one connection are refused for a while.

Issue, revoke and restore

A student's page in the course (Students, then the student) has a Certificate band:

• Issue certificate gives a certificate to a student who does not have a valid one, whether or not they have completed the course. The student will be emailed about it. It cannot be issued while their email address is not confirmed.
• Revoke certificate marks the certificate as revoked. Its page will say Revoked, without a reason, and will no longer offer the PDF. The student is not emailed.
• Restore certificate makes a revoked certificate valid again, with the same code and date.

A student who completes the course again after their progress is reset gets a new certificate only when their last one had an end date. A revoked certificate is never replaced automatically.

A student's name changes

A certificate keeps the name the student's account had when it was issued. When the account's name changes, the student can press Use my current name on their course home, or a member can press Issue again with the current name on the student's page, which emails the student. Either one keeps the certificate's code and date and makes a new PDF.

Removing and erasing a student revokes their certificates; see Course students and reports.

If a certificate's page does not open with its code, Contact support.