Setting up HTML certificates in your course

How you enable certificates for your course will vary depending on how your Open edX site has been set up. For our customers, you'll use one of two ways:

• Enterprise Customers: By default, Certificates are already active on all your courses and any new course you create. We'll configure and style your certificates for you as part of your enterprise setup process.
• Tahoe Customers: You'll need to enable certificates on your site first and customize them to fit your brand. You can do that by following the steps in Enabling HTML certificates in Tahoe.

Once certificates are set up, as long as students reach the passing score for the course you outlined in  your grading policy, they will be able to access their certificates from their Progress page. If you want to learn more about the process from the learner end, check out our article Certificates from the student perspective. For now, let's get back to setting up certificates.

Firstly, to make any changes to your certificates, you can access the Certificates page in Studio. You'll find this under Settings.

From this page you can make any changes from your default certificate setup, from deactivation, editing certificate details and changing signatories. 

Editing Certificates

When editing certificate details, you can change the default name that is displayed on certificates as well as add/delete/adjust any information for the default signatories. 

You can also delete existing signatories or add new ones. To delete a signatory, just click the trash can icon next to that signatory. 

To add a new signatory, scroll down to the bottom of this page (while in edit mode), and click Add Additional Signatory. 

Note: Be careful with adding too many signatories. Adding too many can cause a certificate to look messy. Always look at your certificates and check they look good before you release them to learners.

Editing Signatories

To edit individual signatories, click the Edit button. 

From here, you can change all the information about a signatory as well as upload a new signature file. We recommend using PNGs of your signatures at a high resolution on a pure white or transparent background, as scans and photos of actual signatures on paper can look strangely off-white. Don't forget to save your changes!

Once you've added your certificate and activated it (in the top right of the page), your certificate is ready. There's just one last (optional) step.

Allowing learners to claim their own certificates

In most cases, you'll want learners to be able to claim certificates for themselves on the progress page. For self-paced courses, this is already done! You're good to go. For instructor-led courses, however, you'll need to Enable Student-Generated Certificates. To do this, in the LMS head to the Instructor dashboard, and the Certificates tab (which will only appear once certificates are set up). From there, it's just one button to enable them.