Create new Certificate Templates

If the default templates provided with Awards do not meet your needs, you can create your own certificate templates from which administrators or instructors can create certificates for their courses.

Note: To prevent plagiarism and protect an organization's intellectual and branding copyrights, all earned certificates downloaded from the Awards tool are password-protected from editing. Each certificate is generated with a random password that is not displayed to users, preventing anyone from editing the certificate in Adobe® Acrobat® or Adobe Reader®. This makes it unnecessary to manually add password-protection to uploaded certificates.

  1. Using an application, such as Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, or Adobe Acrobat Professional, create a form.
  2. Add images, branding, and static text to complete your default design.
  3. Save the form as a PDF document.
  4. Open the PDF file (in Adobe Acrobat for example) and create a new PDF form based on the PDF you opened.
  5. Add text boxes to the PDF to include the content that you want on your completed Certificate.
  6. Map the text boxes and their corresponding tooltip boxes to the txtBox Name using supported text strings. Text strings are automatically replaced with user, course, and award values when you generate the certificate. Supported text strings include:
    • {CourseStartDate}
    • {CourseEndDate}
    • {CourseName}
    • {UserFirstName}
    • {UserLastName}
    • {UserEmail}
    • {UserName}
    • {FullName}
    • {OrgDefinedID}
    • {OrgUnitCode}
    • {AwardDate}
    • {AwardExpiryDate}
    • {AwardName}
    • {AwardDescription}
    • {AwardEvidence}
    • {IssuerName}
    • {IssuerContact}
    • {AwardCreditValue}
  7. Ensure that each text box is large enough for any replacement text (such as the hyphenated last name of a learner, or a multi-sentence description of an award).
  8. Enable Word Wrap so that the text is not cut off, and the text that you want for each text box appears as expected.
  9. In Brightspace, access the course, in which you want to create certificate templates.
  10. Navigate to the Awards tool and click Certificate Templates.
  11. Click Upload New Template.
  12. Browse to the location of the PDF form that you created.
  13. Create a certificate and then associate the new template you created with the certificate.
  14. Publish a few test certificates to confirm that the layout appears as expected.