How to Create a Certificate of Knowledge

The Certificate of Knowledge is a formal recognition that a learner has passed a final exam and achieved a specific level of knowledge in a course. This guide will walk you through how to create, customize, and manage a Certificate of Knowledge within your LearnWorlds platform

Create a Certificate of Knowledge

If you wish to create a Certificate of Knowledge:

1. Create your course and the Course Sections.

2. Go to Courses → Course manager, find your course & then go to its Course outline tab.

3. Click on Add an Activity.

4. Under the Certificates category, choose the Certificate type of learning activity.

5. Click Save to create the activity or Save & Edit to begin customizing immediately.

Set up the Certificate of Knowledge

After you create the Certificate (of Knowledge) learning activity, hover over and click on Settings (if you have clicked on Save and Edit in the activity creation process, skip this step). On the side form that appears, you can set up the Certificate activity's details.

You can choose the 

• Title
• Description
• Specify what the requirements are for awarding this certificate (only exams, all learning units, no requirements at all) 
• Unit background image or 
• Extra material as a digital download, and 
• Choose if this activity should be password protected.

You can also connect external certification tools like Accredible or Credly to use their templates for this certificate. To use Accredible or Credly, you must first connect your accounts under LearnWorlds Settings.

Certificate Structure

After you create the Certificate (of Knowledge) hover over and click on Edit Questions.  

That type of activity consists of four customizable parts: Starting Screen, Certificate candidate details, Assessment Questions, and Ending Screen. Let's check each one of them:

1. Starting / Welcome Screen

This is the first page that your users will see when they start the assessment. If you wish, you can remove or/and re-add it. You can modify the screen’s template by clicking on the Starting screen option. When the editing mode of the screen's template opens, you can add widgets, change the text, add questions, etc. Check more information about this here.

2. Certificate candidate details 

• Choose if you want to use the Default Certificate template or not.
• Upload your custom certificate template (available in the Pro Trainer plan or higher). You can check how to create a PDF certificate in this article.
• See the available PDF keys.

If no custom PDF is uploaded, the system will fall back to the default template.

You can further customize the Certificate screen by adding the available certificate fields. These are the custom fields you can include and populate on the certificate by using the certificate PDF keys:

• First & Last Name: We recommend keeping these fields required so the Certificate will be personalized and register the user's personal details (name & last name).
• Short Text: You can ask a question so the users can place a short answer before claiming the certificate. You can choose the maximum and minimum characters of the answer.
• Dropdown: You can add a question with dropdown choices.
• Date: You can include a date-related question and let your users choose a date from the calendar.
• Consent: You can add a consent question and make the acceptance of all Consent options mandatory or Add tags to users who give particular responses.
• Content block.

You can add as many custom certificate fields as you want and populate them on an external PDF fillable Editor by using Certificate PDF keys while creating your custom Certificate template.

You can check how to create a custom PDF certificate via external fillable PDF editors in this article (available in the Pro Trainer plan or higher).

When you add a certificate PDF key (if available for a specific certificate field), e.g., cert_dropdown, cert_input, etc, you need to use the same PDF key in the PDF Editor when you create a custom PDF certificate. The key e.g cert_dropdown can be used on the certificate template and populate the information/answer the user will submit on this specific certificate field in your LearnWorlds school.

3. Assessment Questions

After you create the Certificate (of Knowledge), hover over it and click on Edit Certificate. On the next screen, you can add the questions of the Assessment (Exam).

If you click on Add Question you can add different types of questions:

• Multiple Choice
• Multiple Answers
• Match and Ordering
• Short Text
• Text Assignment
• File Assignment (available in the Pro Trainer plan or higher)
• Record Video (available in the Pro Trainer plan or higher)
• Content Blocks

You can edit further and set up each question type. Find more about how to structure your assessment questions in this article and how to configure the assessment settings here.

You can also import questions from the Question Bank, from another assessment, or from an XLS file.

For Text Assignment and File assignment types of questions, grading will be required for the Certification to be awarded. Answers will be shown and available for grading in the Reports Center and specifically via the Review Center.

4. After Submission - Ending Screen

Once a learner submits an exam, they are presented with an ending screen. There are three available views for when the: 

• Learner passes (Pass screen)
• Learner fails (Fail screen)
• Results are pending (Pending screen). If Text Assignments, File Assignments, or Record Video/Audio types of questions are added to an Exam Learning activity, the Assessments will be moved to the Review Center for grading. The users will see the Pending status ending screen until the Assessment has been graded.

You can click on the assessment container in the ending screen to customize each screen. Find more information about this here.

How to Configure (Assessment) Settings

You can configure the settings of the Certificate's assessment as described in this article: How to Configure the Assessment Settings.

You can also allow Users to Share their Certificates on Social Media.

How to Add a Widget

Hover over the added questions and click on the +icon to add widgets to your questions (text, buttons, images, embed code, etc).

Manage Certificates

After a Certificate has been issued, all the details of the user and the respective course that the certificate is affiliated with appear on Courses → Certificates, where you can see and download the users' earned certificates.

You can find out more on how to manage your issued Certificates, in our respective article.

• Since admin Certificate submissions are stateless, the Certificates generated are dummy certificates to allow admins to perform multiple submissions.
• Each user can download the earned Certificate unlimited times with their submitted personal details on it (Name, Surname, Date of completion, Score, etc) either from the course player or their profile page.
• You can also choose whether or not users will be able to share their certificates on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook.