Certificates - Current State, Gaps, and Opportunities

The user experience of configuring certificates for staff is extremely lacking. There are no tools for customising the look-and-feel from the course staff side, and templates must be edited and uploaded directly into the platform itself by a system administrator. There are controls that are hidden until hovered, and multiple edit buttons that are unclear what exactly it is they edit - editing the certificate allows you to edit the certificate and signatories, while editing the signatory allows you to edit the signatory. This makes very little sense. Worse still, some controls that are available for per-course certificate customization are found in advanced settings in JSON format.

For learners, certificates can be difficult for some learners to claim, and it can be unclear where certificates are claimed from. Learners are not directly notified or informed when they are eligible for their certificates, and many user workflows are based on instructor-led training, rather than the more common self-paced use-case.

Despite these issues, certificates perform well, and have no obvious accessibility or internationalisation issues.

Certificates work, but they are clumsy to configure, not easily customizable, and generally neglected, despite being one of the only tools that most free course platforms have to make money.

The certificates feature has been maintained over the years, but not improved, and pieces of functionality have been carved off during that time with no replacement, such as the ability to issue PDF certificates directly and controls that manage the early delivery of certificates. No significant improvements have been made to the workflows and functionality of Open edX certificates in many years - for example, despite content completion being more trackable, it cannot factor into certificate issuing criteria.

Overall the certificates feature is functional, but is lacking in many areas, and is fundamentally less featureful than certification functionality offered by other LMSes.

Configuration Workflow

Configuration for certificates is currently extremely non-ideal.

• Enabling certificates for an instance requires editing .yml files and configuring various properties in Django admin in order for certificate generation to function.

• Certificate-related functionality is spread across multiple areas of the platform, in different pages of Studio and the instructor dashboard, rather than existing on the certificates page.

• Instructor-facing UI has basically no control over certificate look-and-feel other than adding signatories.

• Multiple configuration options to customise certificate text lives within advanced settings.

• Many references and fields in advanced settings still exist that apply to and refer to the old PDF certificates, which are no longer supported.

There are many common tasks such as issuing certificates to learners and governing when learners are able to claim certificates that are significantly more technically complex to configure than anyone would expect them to be.

Community Opinions

The community regularly has issues with configuring and enabling certificates, and a cursory search of Slack shows this clearly, with numerous questions about enabling the functionality and asking why it doesn’t work. There are many points at which the certificate configuration process can be failed, often due to workflows specific to the http://edX.org implementation of the platform - for example, the many different enrollment tracks that are under-documented and don’t apply to the majority of use-cases.

There is minimal feedback about the feature once-enabled, but anecdotally, so much of the configuration and customisation of certificates requires work from the site provider’s side that there isn’t much to actually provide feedback on. Even basic certificate customisation such as applying brand colours and logos to the certificate requires custom work on the template from outside of the UI.

Feature Improvement Recommendations

Work on improving the configuration and handling of certificates etc. is already underway, but the basic wishlist for this feature based on this analysis is to have:

• Better tools for building and customising certificates on a per-course basis via a proper user interface in Studio for non-technical personas

• Better support for co-branded certificates (i.e. multiple logos)

• Better out-of-the-box certificate templates

• Certificates enabled by default with basic configuration presets

• All references controls, tools, and references to PDF certificates to be removed

• Certificates to be issuable based on course progress, not just based on graded content completion

  • Additionally, progress should be configurable as an and/or requirement - “complete 80% of content and achieve a grade of 70% to pass this course”. Currently if graded content is front-loaded, it is possible to earn certificates without completing the majority of course content, which is a regular issue.

• The option for learners to download HTML certificates directly as PDF files (rather than expecting them to know that they can just print to PDF)

• The option to post certificates directly to LinkedIn profiles

• More information available to certificate templates, such as grade earned

• Automated certificate expiration for time-bound certification

• Certification for programs with a user-friendly UI

Certificates are fundamentally necessary for a wide range of learning contexts, from free online courses to professional certifications, and they are offered from all notable competitor LMSes with a wide range of target markets. In order to compete in this space, however, Open edX needs a much more robust certificate solution, as Open edX’s certificate configuration and customisation options are objectively worse than most major competitors. Investment is necessary, but development is thankfully already underway to improve Open edX’s credentialing capabilities, and it’s a well-timed initiative both in terms of core feature definition, and competitive differentiation.

If designed and implemented correctly, Open edX has a real opportunity to carve a niche with superior certification capabilities that are often lacking and neglected, as the rise of open badging, learning record stores, and similar provide ample opportunities for providing a good certification experience for course operators and learners that is missing from the wider competitive landscape outside of integrations with third-party providers like Accredible. Many platforms simply issue a PDF certificate and leave it at that, when credentials have much broader requirements. Where that need is recognised, it’s often solved by pushing the issue off-platform to a third-party provider, which can have negative financial and user experience implications.