Online course certificates allow you to validate your students’ efforts and reward them for completing your online course. Certificates act as great incentives for students, as they can use them as proof of acquired skills and knowledge. At the same time, awarding certificates gives more validity to your courses.
If you are using LearnDash LMS, you have the advantage that the platform itself offers online course certificates as a built-in feature, allowing you to award certificates on course and quiz completion. However, there are many ways you can take this feature to the next level and get more out of your online course certificates.
Keep reading to discover different tools and strategies you can use to improve your LearnDash certificates.
How To Up level Your LearnDash course Certificates
Here are three different LearnDash add-ons you can use to build better certificates and insights on how to use them to get the best results.
Award Different Certificates For Each Course
While courses offer well-defined knowledge and skillset to their students, often people enroll in them for different reasons. For example, if you are offering a course on CPR, medical and nursing students might take this course to comply with a school requirement, while healthcare professionals can use it as a resource for continuing education. Yet, others might enroll in the course simply to learn a valuable life skill. Finally, if you offer several related healthcare courses, this course might just be one element in a larger group of courses or course paths.
In cases such as this, it can prove extremely beneficial to be able to award different certificates to your students, according to their specific goals, upon course completion.
You can easily put this into action using the Learndash Multi Certificates Add-on. This add-on allows you to add multiple certificates to a single course or quiz. Your students can even select the certificate they wish to receive based on their requirements. Once they’ve selected a certificate, they can download it and receive it in their email.
Plus, you can award multiple certificates to students after completing a group of courses.
Offer Certificate Verification
If your students are looking to present their achievements to an employer, teacher or educational institution, the credentials and certificates they earn must comply with certain requirements. Verifiable certificates, containing a unique ID or QR code, student information, course and instructor information, as well as date of completion and expiry are a valuable resource for students looking to validate the knowledge they’ve acquired from your course.
While LearnDash doesn’t offer course certificate validation by default, you can easily implement this quality to your certificates using the LearnDash Certificate Verify and Share add-on. Not only does this add-on add all of the elements listed above to your course certificates but it also allows LearnDash certificates to be verified directly on your site.
The add-on creates a verification page on your website, where students can directly find any certificate’s verification information by entering their unique certificate ID. Anyone with the certificate ID can visit the site and confirm the veracity of their credentials.
What’s even better, students can share an image of their verifiable certificate as well as a link to the certificate’s verification page as posts on their Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter accounts, and they can even add their certificate to their LinkedIn profiles. Social sharing options are accessible right from the certificates verification page, making the process of sharing certificates easy and user-friendly.
Monetize Course Certificates
There are many ways to monetize an online course, with selling the course as a product being just one of them. Another great option is to sell course certificates. This is an especially great solution if you already have some free courses listed on your site. In fact, big eLearning sites like Coursera have been able to generate millions in revenue by selling course certificates alone, despite their course content is accessible for free.
New students on your site will not hesitate to give a free course a try, and if they find the content to be good, they’ll most likely be willing to invest in a certificate to validate their efforts.
LearnDash, on its own, doesn’t allow you to sell course certificates on its own, however, you can implement this feature to your site using the LearnDash Pay for Certificate add-on. This add-on displays a purchase button that allows users to directly purchase any earned certificate after course completion. Once payment is complete, users will be able to download their certificate.
You can also select which course certificates will be offered for sale specifically.
Why do online course certificates matter?
Online course certificates are a great feature to add to your online courses as they benefit both students and course creators. As a course creator, course certificates allow your course to stand out and offer additional value to your students. In turn, this will help you make more course sales.
At the same time, your students can benefit from their certificates in their professional or educational life, by being able to collect evidence of the knowledge and skills they are acquiring. They can also share their accomplishments with their friends and family, resulting in a greater sense of achievement.
Most importantly, a course certificate gives your students some recognition for their work and effort and makes them feel like they walked away from your course has made a real and tangible improvement.
You’re on your way to better LearnDash Certificates
We hope that this post inspired you to implement different elements on your course certificates and put something new on the table. If you need help setting up any of these features and LearnDash add-ons on your eLearning site, don’t hesitate to reach out to our LearnDash consultants. Also, if you are thinking about getting a few tools for your online course site, don’t forget to check out our LearnDash bundles! By purchasing add-ons in a bundle you can get your new add-on stack for an unbeatable price.
