How to Make Certificates of Completion for Courses for Free
For creators who sell online courses, offering a certificate of completion is a successful approach to motivating students and boosting commitment. Certificates can likewise assist you with distinguishing your courses from your competitors and along these lines, they can be a powerful marketing tool too. However, certain online learning platforms like Kajabi don’t permit you to make certificates of completion locally.
Also, certain course platforms like Teachable and Thinkific don’t permit you to create certificates at their lower pricing levels. In this case, you have to make certificates of completionin an online coursework template tool like Canva and send them physically to your students every time which can truly be time-consuming. These portals are perfect for you to design a certificate.
On the other hand, you have to utilize a particular certificate tool like Accredible which implies an additional cost for your business which probably won’t work for everyone. In this guide, We’ll be going to show you the specific course of creating a certificate of completion using Google Slides for free and further send it to your students automatically using Zapier.
Along these lines, let’s design a certificate together!
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How to Make Certificates of Completion for Free
Here are a few steps to design a certificate for free:
Step 1: Make Certificates of Completion Template in Google Slides
The most important phase in the online coursework certificate creation is to make a certificate template in Google Slides. You can either create a presentation without any preparation or you can utilize one of the existing templates.
Now there are two significant things that you have to do!
In the first place, you have to modify the plan of the certificate template and you will do this the same way you would edit any Google Slide. We will pass on this task to you and you can modify the plan according to your necessities.
Second, you have to specify what information you need to add to your certificate and define them as variables in your template.
A portion of the information that you would regularly need to have on an online coursework certificate includes student name, course name, issuing date and so on.
For Google Slides to treat these as variables and not customary text, you have to wrap variable names with two curly supports.
The variable name hasn’t anything to do with the variable name either in your online course portal or some other software. For example, you can have a variable for student name as {{name}} or {{student_name}} or {{user_name}}, it doesn’t exactly make any difference.
Once you are done editing the certificate, give it a legitimate name so you can identify it later.
Your certificate template is now prepared and we can move to setting up the most common way of making genuine certificates.
Step 2: Set up a Zap to Create Certificates Automatically
To create certificates automatically on learner action in your online course platform, you can go for Zapier. It is an automation software that allows you to connect different apps.
The vast majority of the well-known course hosting platforms including Digital Class, Kajabi, Teachable, and Thinkific integrate straightforwardly with Zapier. If you utilize some other online course platform, make sure to check if they have an integration with Zapier or not.
Zapier has a free arrangement but you’ll have to involve a portion of its superior elements in request to create and send certificates. They truly do offer a 14-day free preliminary of their top-notch highlights.
If you as of now have an account, just log in and you will see the ‘Make a Zap’ button at the top. Click on the button to begin creating your zap.
In the first place, you have to choose your online course platform as your trigger app. For example, if you use Digital Class, you have to look for it and select it from the list of apps on the right.
Essentially, we are creating a zap that gets triggered when a certain occasion happens in your online course platform.
Next, you have to define the trigger occasion!
In this case, we need to send the certificate when someone passes a quiz effectively. In this way, you have to make sure that there is a trigger action for Quiz Result for your online course platform in Zapier.
For example, if you utilize Teachable, you can involve the trigger for the New Graded Quiz Result in Zapier.
Moreover, Kajabi has an “Assessment Completed trigger” which you can use to trigger your Zap when a learner completes a test. However, I favour using the Tag Added trigger for Kajabi because it gives you substantially more adaptability.
Thus, you can tag your users in Kajabi when they pass a quiz and then you can utilize a similar tag to trigger this Zap.
In the following stage, select Create Presentation From Template as the action in the Google Slides app.
Essentially, we’ll pass the information from our course portal to Google Slides using the variables we discussed in step #1.
Now, you’ll have to pick what information will be passed to Google Slides. Essentially we have to define what goes where.
- Give your certificate a one-of-a-kind name. You can utilize a combination of the Student’s Name and Course Name.
- Make the presentation shared with the goal that the user can download it.
- Choose the certificate template we created in step #1.
- You will then see the variables that we had created for the template before. Select the corresponding information from your trigger app and map it to the variables in Google Slide.
- You can pass the date to your certificate by using {{zap_meta_human_now}} in your date section.
The approach of tagging students in Kajabi makes sure that the user has passed the quiz and only then does this zap get triggered.
But if you were to utilize the inbuilt quiz result trigger for either Teachable or Kajabi in Zapier, the zap would get triggered every time a user completes a quiz regardless of whether he/she has passed it or not.
The workaround in this case is to add a channel step between the trigger app and the action app and set a condition that the student score is more prominent than the passing score.
In this way, we have completed the fundamental arrangement to create a certificate in Google Slides and now, we can modify the zap so the certificate gets conveyed to the student automatically too.
Step 3: Modify the Zap to Send the Certificate of Completion to the Students
In request to send the certificates automatically, we have to add one more step to our Zap.
Now, add another action app toward the end which will be Email by Zapier.
Then, arrange the email template. You can pass the learner’s email address from your trigger app in the ‘To’ field. You need to further enter the subject of the email and the email body.
Finally, you have to choose the Export Links Application/pdf option under connection. This will make sure that a PDF duplicate of the certificate will be shipped off to the user.
There are other fields like From Name, Reply-To and so on which are optional and you can customize them too if you have any desire.
Then, click on Create and Continue to test this step in your Zap.
Now, click on the ‘Finish’ button if everything is done and then switch your Zap on. You can continuously return and make any modifications to your certificate template, your email body and so forth.
Now that your Zap is on, it will create and send an automated certificate to anyone who completes a course on your platform.
How Can I Make Certificates of Completion After Course Completion Rather Than Quiz Results?
It truly relies upon what online course platform you want to design a certificate on.
You’ll need to substitute the trigger for Quiz Result with Course Completion in your Zap and the remainder of the arrangement will remain the same.
If you use Kajabi, there is no built-in trigger for Course Completion in Zapier and there is no simple method for tagging your users within Kajabi when they complete a course.
You can use the Content Locking component to keep users from skipping any lectures and when they complete the last lecture, you can tag them which can then be used to trigger the Zap.
How Can I Format the Date on the Certificates?
The default date format in Zapier includes the date along with the time. If you have any desire to change the format, you’ll need to use the Formatter App in Zapier.
The Formatter will go not long before the Google Slides step in the Zap so it can pass the formatted date to the certificate.
Conclusion
To conclude, you can easily make certificates of completion for free without any fuss. There are plenty of online coursework platforms to create certificates on. Moreover, You can use countless cases for giving testaments and what’s conceivable is simply restricted by your creative mind. If you have any inquiries or have a few thoughts, go ahead and share them with us in the comments below.
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