Setting up Certificates

The Oppia server can automatically generate pdf certificates, which users can then download to save/print, and can be automatically be emailed to users.

How to create certificates for courses

Create an image file for your certificate template. This should be a .jpg or .png, 842px wide by 595px high (to match A4 landscape pdf at 72dpi)
In your image you can add the borders, layout, logos/text etc. You don’t need to put in the course title, as the pdf generator can add this, but leave a space for the name.
Go to the Django admin pages for your Oppia server, then go to the Oppia section and click on Certificate Templates.
You can either add a new certificate template, or edit an existing one. Note that each course you want to award a certificate for will need it’s own image file uploaded, but you can upload the same image for multiple courses.
When adding a new template, select the badge the certificate is related to (will usually be course completed), the course and upload the image file.
Until you have the coordinates (eg user name, course title, date etc) lined up and outputting correctly on your certificate, leave the certificate template disabled, else it will start sending out certificates before you have the final settings.
From the listing of certificate templates, you click to see a preview/sample. If you haven’t adjusted any of the other options and coordinates, all the data will be printed in the bottom left corner of the certificate.
So now we need to decide on which of the 3 data points will be included on the certificate (name, course title and date), and adjust the positioning of these.
Just click to edit the template again, and you can decide which of the three data points will appear. For those that you would like to appear, you’ll need to edit the corresponding X,Y coordinates.
The X, Y coordinates are measured in pixels from the bottom left of the template image, and denotes the bottom middle of where the data point text will appear. So you can use the recommended certificate template image size to help you get started.
Likely you’ll need to edit these settings and got back to the preview/sample a few times until you have all this lined up correctly.
Once you are happy with the layout and positioning, you can then enable the certificate template. The certificates will start getting generated very shortly, and will include creation of certificates for users who had previously completed the course.

Notes and Comments

If you find the course name is too long to automatically be printed on the certificate, you can pre-input the course title on the certificate image template and untick the “include_course_title” on the certficiate template.

How are certificates awarded?

Certificates are created for the selected courses when a user completes the course and is awarded the badge. So the criteria for getting the certificate is the same as that for the badge.

The certificate pdfs are generated and stored on the server, alongside the users badge. So if the course is updated and/or the certificate template is changed, users will retain the certificate at the point in time they were awarded it.

How do users get their certificates?

Users can get their certificates from:

Downloading in the Oppia app (from the badges screen)
Downloading from the Oppia server
As an attachment via email. Note that for certificates to be emailed, the OPPIA_EMAIL_CERTIFICATES setting to be True, plus the user needs to have a valid email address

Certificate validation

You can optionally add a verification code to the certificate, in the form of a URL link or QR core (for example to allow supervisors or managers to check the certificate is valid).

When validation is enabled on the certificate template, the URL or QR code will link to the Oppia server to show if the certificate is valid or not. Note that a user account is not required to validate a certificate.