Moodle - Certificates
- Matthew Harrington
Analytics
Surprisingly, Moodle does not actually include certificates out of the box on its core LMS offering. It does, however, have a plugin, which is included by default on Moodle Workplace, as certificates are more typically used in the business context for low-stakes qualifications, while academic institutions tend to have very strict control over certification.
The plugin is very basic in nature - when a learner meets the preset requirement, the certificate can be claimed in PDF format. This functionality seems very half-baked, and not high quality from screenshots and general sentiments about it. The resulting certificates do not look modern without significant customization.
The certificates have a number of preset options for teachers in the Moodle UI, including whether to email certificate issuing notifications (and where), how to issue the certificate (browser tab, download, or email), whether to save the certificate to the Moodle site, how long a learner must be in the course to earn the certificate (independent of grading), as well as various controls for what information should appear on the certificate.
The following information can appear on a Moodle certificate:
Learner name
Course name
Course code
Grade
Outcome (pass, etc.)
Credit hours
Teacher name
Custom text
Certificates earned by learners can be shared to LinkedIn via a sharing button, and general options like this are found in a site- and tenant-wide settings interface for administrators. Moodle Workplace ships with a Certification manager role (tool_certification_manager) that is applied in System context. The role allows the creation and management of certifications within the current tenant and allocating learners to them, as well as view and edit access to existing certificates.
Moodle Workplace also supports a visual certificate builder interface, which allows the user to create the certificate in a visual interface. This interface isn’t super modern or particularly impressive, but it does allow staff to build certificates without requiring PHP, the way the older certificates module does.
Moodle has numerous integrations with certification platforms and badge providers.
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