Designing a Certificate of Completion as an Activity in a Course

Owned by Luc Richard
Last updated: Sept 14, 2023
2 min read

While the method described in this article is still supported, adding certificates of completion as an activity in a course is generally not considered a best practice. You may instead want to consider designing a certificate of completion at the system level.

It is recommended to develop certificates of completion at the system level. This method is has numerous advantages. That being said, there are circumstances when an instructor may prefer to use the "Simple Certificate" activity within a course. While this method is generally more labour-intensive because you need to add a "Simple Certificate" activity to each and every course, it may be necessary if you don't want to restrict the certificate of completion based on the receipt of a  learning record. 

Step-by-step Guide

While we recommend that you restore a certificate using one of our templates, you can also develop one from scratch. To develop a certificate from scratch in a course:

  1. Go to the course in question

  2. Turn editing on

  3. Click on "Add an activity or resource"

  4. Select "Simple Certificate" from the list of activities and click on the "Add" button

  5. Give your certificate a name (generally "Certificate of Completion")

  6. Develop your template by modifying each settings as per your preferences

  7. Click on the "Save and display" button at the bottom of the page.

Once the steps above are completed, you can click on the "Get your certificate" button to download your certificate in PDF format. If you want to modify your certificate, feel free to go back, edit the settings for the certificate in question and save it.

We recommend the following:

  • If offering bilingual courses, we recommend you develop two (2) certificates: one in English and one in French. And then restrict those certificates based on the user's preferred language just like you would other activities. You can refer to Translating Courses articles for more guidelines on setting up a bilingual course.

  • The "Certificate Image File" should be 1124px x 795px and include high resolution images.

  • You may want to use basic CSS in the "Certificate Text" to format the text (e.g. color, font-size, font-style, text-align)

  • Use tokens as much as possible. Try not to hardcode course titles on the certificate itself. By using tokens, you'll be able to re-use the certificate in other courses. (You can get a list of all the tokens available by clicking on the ? icon next to the "Certificate Text" when you're editing the certificate activity.)

  • If you need to implement an HTML table and want it centered, you need make use of the width and align elements as per the following example: <table width="100%" style="text-align: center;">

Related Articles