Certificates and Notification Templates

Certificates can be created to be issued to learners for the completion of courses or learning paths, passing of tests, and achievement of skills. The certificates can contain end date or course planning status. Participants can access certificates directly from the course as well as via the learning history. The "Never" option sees only an Administrator able to view or print certificates and not the participant. Administrators view certificates in the course’s Participant administration or Course instruction functions.

• Certificate: attendance/fail (10146) - This meta tag can be added if desiring to provide certificates to participants who participated in training but did do not successfully complete the course. This meta tag is optional and must be added to Course Types or Course Templates if desired to use.

• Type of certificate (11812) - This meta tag controls the used certificate type. There is a choice between an automatically generated certificate (default) or the upload of an external certificate per participant which is ideal for externally delivered training. This meta tag is optional and must be added to Course Types or Course Templates if desired to use.

If the above meta tags are desired and not visible when creating a course, it will be required to check the Course template or Course type settings in the "Meta tags and attributes" tab to Add or make visible at the Course.

Test Certificate

Test Certificates have no additional options or specific meta tags as with Courses and Learning Paths. In a Test the Certificates are uploaded in the "Test player", or applied automatically if an existing Test player is selected, with options available for "Certificate: pass" and "Certificate: attendance/fail". Therefore, the creation of two certificates with different wording could be desired. A useful point worth noting when creating Test certificates is that there are no variables available that relate to the Course, although Tests are delivered via Courses.

Skill Certificate

Skill Certificates have no additional options or specific meta tags as with Courses and Learning Paths. Once created the Skill certificate can be linked by editing the desired Skills and uploading in the "Skill certificate" field. When creating the use of variables to describe the name, description, achieved level and achieved level description can be useful to create meaningful certificates; this though would require a consistent approach when creating the skills and skill levels. Where achieved skills are subject to expiry dates it is worth inserting the "Date" (achieved date) and "Scheduling" variables.

Course Notification Template

Course notification templates are not certificates, but rather PDF attachments that draw course and participant information that can be added to course Notifications. In the "Notification" tab of all Notifications related to courses, there is a field "Attachment template" where Course notification templates can be selected.

Duplicate

Duplicate is only selectable when a single existing certificate is highlighted. This will create a copy of the highlighted certificate and is ideal where an existing certificate is close to the requirements of a new certificate; E.g. changing a logo or signature image.

Edit

Delete

Clearances

Versioning

Preview

Shows a preview of the certificate and what it looks like. In the preview, the placeholders are included which will later be replaced by the participant course data

Download Placeholders

The export templates manager allows the download of a CSV file that contains all available placeholders. It contains the following three columns:

• Name of the placeholder

• Context of the placeholder (course, location, enrolment or user)

• Placeholder

Docx Certificates

When creating Course and Learning Path certificates it is possible to upload certificates that are produced externally in .docx format. When choosing the "Use uploaded template" option, an upload field is enabled where the admin can upload a .docx-based certificate template. This .docx can be downloaded as .docx or .pdf depending on what option was chosen as document generation mode.

When working with the template, it is important that the resulting content is valid, therefore special attention must be paid to not formatting only parts of a placeholder, as this will result in the placeholder not being recognised anymore. A tool for checking the validity of the content of the .docx file can be found at https://docx4java.org/docx4j/ . This add-on can be installed and is then available as part of MS Word to be used after selecting a certain portion of text. This tool will help identify if any placeholders have been impacted by the formatting.

The placeholders used here must follow the pattern as seen in the sample file, with the special characters ${placeholder_key}. Moreover, a new placeholder can be added on any of the Document generation mode types to display the cumulative certifications on the certificate when completing a course (using this placeholder in the indicated format → CourseCertifications) or a learning path (using this placeholder in the indicated format → CumulativeCourseCertifications). The certifications are a sum of all the certifications that can be achieved and assigned to a certificate.

The certifications placeholder needs to be added to the certificate and directly assigned to the learner, otherwise they will not be visible on the certificate! The certification will be visible on the certificate at the bottom of the page and they will be structured by certification set next to each individual certification the learner can see the cumulative certification hours or points achieved.

An improperly formatted placeholder will be split in the XML structure and will no longer be recognized. Valid formatting should result in the placeholder being kept together with the surrounding special characters that help the app recognize it as a placeholder and not plain text. A list with course and user-related placeholders can be downloaded from the toolbar action in the manager

Note: For custom fonts to be recognised, they need to be available on the LMS server in the path: data/printdesign/fonts. If custom fonts are not loading lodge a ticket with the imc Support team and this may require providing the font set if not held by imc.

Hints & Tips

• Participants can be alerted by an email notification when they receive a new certificate. This can be enabled in the "Notification" function by expanding the "Comprehensive notification" folder and activating the "Assignment of a new certificate" notification.

• HTML editing of certificates using the "Source" button is rather limited due to an HTML sanitizer. Where more control is required for certificate design for Course and Learning path certificates it is recommended to upload a .docx template.

• Adding certificate meta tags to Learning Path types is likely required if not done by an imc consultant during the original system implementation.

• Loading of certificates dynamically generates certificates each time meaning variable data is subject to change if there have been changes to object meta tags (e.g. change in course administrator) or learner profile (e.g. Last- name) post-completion.

• In Learning paths and Course certificates just about all meta tags and personal attributes can be inserted with variables. Where restrictions are required to prevent including certain meta tags or attributes, this can be configured in the "Configuration" function by editing the "Placeholder" option.

• Where a unique ID is desired for certificates many imc customers will insert variables for the Object ID and Person ID at the bottom of the page.

• By configuring the schedules jobs “GenerateCertificatesJob“ and “DeleteCreatedCertificatesJob“ an automatic certificate export for external systems can be used. The jobs are influenced via the certificate export configuration.

Related Functions