A great way to reward your students for completing your course is to issue a certificate of completion. This article goes over how to create and manage certificates of completion for your courses.
Overview
For schools on our Pro plan and up. If you create a certificate of completion, your students will be issued a certificate with a unique serial number upon course completion. The appearance of the certificate can be chosen from one of three templates, or you can use Liquid/HTML to create your own. Your students can also download their certificate from this screen:
To navigate to the Certificates page, select one of your courses from the admin sidebar (click View All if the course is not on the sidebar). Then, click the Certificates submenu in the admin sidebar.
Create a certificate
If this is the first time creating a certificate for your course, click the Create New Certificate button. If this is not your first time creating a certificate, click the New Certificate button:
From there, you can choose one of the certificate templates, or create a custom certificate using HTML/Liquid.
Certificate templates
There are three default certificate templates you can choose from when creating a certificate of completion. Once you choose a template, you'll be taken to the certificate editor.
Once there, you can various parts of the certificate in the lefthand sidebar of the Content tab (e.g. logo, title, date, signature, etc). Whenever you make a change to a certificate field, you'll be shown a realtime update of what your certificate will look like. Alternatively, you can click the Preview button to see what your certificate will look like in the lecture view itself.
Once you've completed your certificate, click the Finish button. Afterwards, you can choose whether your new certificate will be the active certificate. The active certificate will automatically be issued to all students upon the completion of your course. When a student completes your course, they'll also receive an email indicating they've been issued a certificate of completion.
Custom certificates
If you choose to create your own custom certificate, you can use Liquid and/or HTML to build the certificate.
Any change you make will be shown in the certificate preview. Alternatively, click the Preview button to see how your certificate will appear in the lecture editor:
Click Finish to create the certificate.
Clicking the gear icon will display your certificate’s settings. From there, you can change the name of the certificate.
Custom certificates should have a width of 800px and a height of 600px.
The following HTML tags can be used in custom certificates:
<a>, <b>, <br>, <code>, <div>, <em>, <h1>, <h2>, <h3>, <h4>, <h5>, <h6>, <hr>,
<i>, <iframe>, <img>, <li>, <ol>, <p>, <pre>, <samp>, <span>, <strong>, <style>,
<table>, <td>, <th>, <tr>, <u>, <ul>
The following HTML attributes can be used in custom certificates:
allow, allowfullscreen, alt, class, data, frameborder, height, href, id, name,
src, style, target, type, value, width
The following Liquid variables are available for custom certificates:
- course.name
- current_school.name
- block.student_name (current_user.name can also be used but be aware that when using Download Certificate in the admin, the admin's name will be used as the current user)
- course.report_card.certificate_issued_at | date: "%d - %m - %y"
- course.report_card.certificate_serial_number
NOTE: Adding custom code to your school is an advanced modification—we can’t guarantee full functionality or compatibility with current or future versions of Teachable. This includes how the code functions, as well as how it impacts the appearance of your school.
Manage your certificates
Your courses can have as many certificates as you'd like. However, you can only have one active certificate at a time. Below your active certificate is a list of your inactive certificates (if any).
At anytime you can edit one of your certificates by clicking the Edit button. Similarly, clicking the menu icon will reveal the option to Activate/Deactivate, Preview, or Delete your certificate. Note that in order to delete an active certificate, it must be deactivated first.
Certificates that have already been issued to students cannot be deleted until the certificates are revoked from those students. The easiest way to do so is filtering your students by those who are enrolled in the specific course, and then going through their user profiles to revoke the certificate.
Manually issue certificates
In some cases, you may not want students to automatically receive certificates upon completing your course. Instead, you may want to manually issue certificates of completion to your students.
To do so, first make sure that none of your certificates are set to active by going to your course’s Certificates page and clicking Deactivate for each active certificate.
Then, you can manually issue certificates by going to the Enrollments tab in a user's profile. From there, click the menu icon and then Issue Certificate. A modal will appear that prompts you to select the certificate you’d like to issue. After you’ve chosen the appropriate certificate, click Issue.
You can also bulk issue certificates from your school’s Students page. Once you’ve filtered your students by the appropriate enrolled course, use the checkboxes to select the students you’d like to issue a certificate to. Afterwards, click the Bulk Actions and then Issue Certificate. A modal will appear that prompts you to select the certificate you’d like the issue. After you’ve chosen the appropriate certificate, click Issue.
Students who have been manually issued a certificate of completion will receive an email notification that contains a link to the Certificate tab of the course curriculum, where students can view and download the certificate.
Download certificates
School owners and course authors can download copies of issued certificates from the Enrollments tab of the user profile.
To download a copy of a student certificate, click the More Actions button next to the specific course, and then select Download Certificate. This will download a copy of the certificate to your device, which you can save or print for your records. The Download Certificate button is only an option for students who have been issued a certificate for their course.
For information on how students can download their own certificates, see the Student experience section below.
Revoke certificates
Once a student has been issued a certificate, the certificate will be listed in the Enrollments tab of their user profile:
If you would like to revoke the certificate from a particular student, you can do so by clicking the Revoke button. In the popup window, click OK to confirm the change.
When a certificate is revoked, it will no longer be available for download via the Certificate tab of the student's course overview page. However, please be aware that the student might have already downloaded the certificate to their computer or device when it was initially issued.
Student experience
Students will unlock the course certificate once they have marked all lectures as complete. The certificate will appear on the screen once the student has completed the final course lecture. Students can click the Download button underneath the certificate to save the certificate to their local computer or device.
Once a certificate is unlocked (or manually issued), the student will also receive an email notification with a link to view the certificate. The student must be opted-in to receive this email.
This email will contain a link to the Certificate tab of the course curriculum where the student can view their certificate. Students can click the Download button underneath the certificate to save a copy to their device if they have not already done so.
If a student is unenrolled from the course, or the certificate has been revoked, they will no longer be able to view the certificate.
