Celebrate achievement with this open-source certificate plugin

January 19, 2021 By Mary Cooch

The new Course Certificate plugin, developed by Moodle Workplace™, is now available for our global community as an add on for the Moodle LMS to design, issue and verify certificates for your learners.

Recognising achievements is both important for learner motivation and also for official accreditation. Moodle Workplace offers a highly customisable certificate option ideally suited to corporate learning and professional development programs as well as traditional academic environments. Always mindful of the importance of empowering educators to improve our world, the Moodle Workplace™ team regularly releases their add-ons to the open source community, ensuring they’re of top quality and maintained regularly. As Martin Dougiamas CEO of Moodle said when Moodle Workplace™ was first released “The [Moodle] Workplace™ team have many features on their roadmap that are beneficial for users in higher education and schools […] over time you will see continual new features incorporated into LMS that have been derived from Moodle Workplace™1

 

Design, issue and verify certificates for your learners

The Course Certificate and Certificate manager plugins have been developed by the Moodle Workplace™ team and released as plugins for the Moodle LMS to the open source community.

The Course certificate brings features appreciated by commercial clients into the reach of everyone. In short, it enables educators and organisations to design and issue Moodle certificates for their learners, including a QR code that anyone can scan to verify the validity of the certificate. 

Let’s take a more detailed look at how these plugins work.


How does it work?

To start designing and issuing certificates for your learners, you need to install both the Course certificate and Certificate manager plugins on your Moodle site.

The Certificate manager allows the admin to create certificate templates which can be used by teachers throughout the site or within a category. This is really useful for ensuring consistency across courses. Helpfully, there’s a default template which can be edited or duplicated to get you started quickly:

 

The template is very user-friendly and it enables you to easily create elements which you can add or remove by dragging them into position on the right. Some of the elements you can create and edit are a background image, a digital signature or a handy QR code for easy verification.

Other elements, like the student name and course name are automatically inserted when the certificate is added in a course.

The second plugin, Course certificate, is actually a Moodle activity that you can add to your courses from the Activity Chooser. When you add it to a course, you can select the template of the Certificate you want to issue, from a dropdown of available certificate templates that you have previously created from the Certificate manager:

 

As with other activities, the Course Certificate can be restricted until certain tasks have been completed, in this case, until the final test is passed:

When a learner passes the test, the certificate becomes available to its proud owner:

 

Learn more and get the Certificate plugins for your Moodle site

Our Moodle documentation has more details both on the Certificate manager and the Course certificate activity. For paid support or help getting the plugins onto your site, our Moodle Partners are happy to provide assistance.

 

Moodle plugins are add-ons that you can install to your Moodle platform to add a specific feature, functionality or even appearance to your Moodle site. Only Moodle administrators can add plugins to a Moodle site – so if you are a teacher and would like to try one, talk to your Admin

[1]Source: How will Moodle Workplace help improve Moodle LMS? A message from our CEO