Introduction
Are you struggling with adding more value to your online courses? Here, we’ll learn all about certificates for online courses, so that way you can charge more and you can add more value to your online courses. Also, the students are going to love having certificates after completing your course.
In this lesson, we’re learning all about certificates for your online courses. What is it? Why use them? What are some of the benefits? How do you configure it? And we’ll go over an example and finally, we’ll summarize our best tips.
😰Challenges course creators if they don’t use offer certificates for their lessons:
- They may not add more value to their courses
- Students may not feel proud after taking your course
- They will not have proof that they offer those courses to students
- They may not get increased sales for their courses
- Students will not have anything to showcase in their job applications
What Is It?
Well, let’s start off with what is a certificate? A certificate is usually a piece of paper, it has a nice little border. It says that you have a certificate that you completed something. You learn something, get a degree, or get an award. So these days it’s all digital, it’s usually an image or a PDF.
Nevertheless, you get a certificate that provides proof that you completed a course or training. As a course creator, teacher, academy owner, you get to create these certificates and we’ll get into that later.
Then students get to use the certificate to prove that they completed a course, or just to be proud that they completed your course.
Why Use It?
💡It lets you charge more, right so you’re going to value stack. You’re adding more things, just like you would add bonuses and templates or to examples or swipe files to your online course to get students, to give students a head start. Well, there’s a certificate that adds value. With that certificate, you can potentially charge more and then students are going to value that.
Certificate that’s certified for all those kinds of things. Students can then use that certificate for their goals. Maybe it’s to prove to somebody that they know something. Maybe it’s a job, a resume, an application that they’re certified in, maybe in a certain creative skill. Of course, they’re just going to feel proud by printing out and hanging up or even framing that certificate.
How-to Guide
So let’s get into how-to guide.
Benefits
First, let’s go over some of the benefits,
For Teachers
Adds Value to Product Offering
For teachers, it’s going to add value to your product offering. So you have a product, it’s an online course, it’s a bundle, it’s some sort of training, and now you can brag that you will get certified, it includes a certificate.
For some of your students, it might really matter a lot, for others, they might just be learning some skills, or they’re at a certain level where they just need to solve a problem that you’re going to help them learn.
Appear More Established
Also, as a teacher, you’re going to seem more established. Your entire academy is going to just get raised up. It’s a higher level. By offering certificates in all across all your different programs, that’s going to level up your academy. You’re not just this YouTube video, but you’re this training program with expertise.That’s going to be great for your academy as you offer additional services like a community or coaching.
Increase Marketing Effects
Finally you as the business owner, the creative teacher, you’re going to get additional benefits. From marketing, people are going to start to learn about your academy. It’s one more thing that’s part of your portfolio. You have your training, you might have your frameworks and your certified sequence.
These are my three steps to doing this thing or learning this creative skill. Well, in addition to all that, you’re now going to have additional marketing effects because word’s going to get out there. That your academy people are going to hear about it through jobs or through conversations, and that’s going to further increase your revenues, your growth, your number of students.
For Students
Feel Proud
😃Now for students, they’re going to, first of all, feel proud that they have a certificate that they accomplished this online course. When they take that certificate and share it. People are going to learn about your brand name. They’re going to talk about it with their circle, community, tribes, and so on. So word is going to get out about your design course, your fashion course, your writing course, et cetera.
Good Investment & Buy More
Secondly, they’re going to know it was a good investment. They got that certificate and now they’re like, “hey, I learned this thing. Let me go ahead and learn potentially another thing from you guys. Having that certificate out, that brand awareness making those students proud that they learned something and really psychologically knowing that, “hey, they paid some money”. Yeah, they’re now at the next level.
So now they can go ahead and maybe take another course from you or another training program from you.
Use on Resumes & Job Applications
🧑💼Finally, students are going to be able to use the certificate. Not physically, but just writing about it and saying that they have this certificate on their resume, on their [00:06:00] job application, on that email with a potential employer. So it really just helps motivate some students, again, depending on where their journey is,
what they’re, what they need this education for. Maybe it’s continuing learning, or maybe they’re at the very beginning of their career, regardless. They might want to get those additional certifications, those trust seals that help them move into their next goal, whatever it is that you do to help your students.
Elements to Configure
Next, let’s talk about how to actually set up the certificate.
With LMS Tech or Manually
First of all, there’s a very important step. You may be using technology to create your certificates automatically, so you may be using a program like Kajabi, Thinkific, Teachable, and that they already provide certificates, and that’s great.
So if you’re provided with a system like that, and they’re creating certificates, they automatically generate them for every single student that passed the course. Then there’s all sorts of criteria. Did they complete the course? They view all lessons? How many hours did they spend? You could configure that and basically at the end of the course, the students are going to automatically get awarded a certificate.
Now, you may not have that whole system set up. You may not be at that level, or maybe your LMS doesn’t support some of these features. Well in the very beginning maybe you don’t offer certificates for all your courses only, maybe some of your high end or maybe you’re just dabbling, another option that you have is that you can manually make these certificates,
You can go create a google slide, a PowerPoint, a keynote, et cetera, put a nice little background there and create a very low tech certificate that you or your team manually creates every time a student completes the course. This might be also good when you want to manually verify some of the content, like they’re doing a particular music piece or a certain fashion piece and they send you a little video.
Then you can see that they really did learn those skills and my certificate is worth something. It’s not just junk paper being printed. Again, you could use technology to potentially auto create these certificates and provide those PDFs for students.
You can go ahead and manually review and potentially even manually print out, create the PDF and send it to your students. So once you have a technique to create these certificates and potentially create and deliver these certificates, let’s go over some of the items that you’ll need to configure on these certificates.
Background, Academy, Logo
So you’ll want to have a nice background, right? You know, maybe one of those nice resume paper looking things, so it almost looks like a beige marble or something like that. It probably has a really elegant border around it. You’re going to specify, your academy name. You’re going to insert your logo of your academy,
Headline, Connectors & Seal
You’re going to have a nice headline. Nice, big fancy letters to say this is a certificate in a course. You’re gonna have all the connectors, these are all the little words. Then you have the helper words, that so and so did this thing on this date. You’re going to have all those kinds of templates of these helper words. Then you’re going to want a nice seal. Something that, you know, traditionally looks like a nice circle with a kind of ribbon with all the little triangles all around it and maybe the two tassels that come out of it.
You got the title there. That really is the front and center of that certificate. That’s important.
Course topic & Name & Image
You’re going to have the name of your course. The name of your course is very specific. You just might have some context, like here’s the topic. Maybe you’re teaching hair design or special effects or poetry. You’re going to have a college name where the school of psychology is, and then you have a very specific degree.
You’re going to want to do that same thing. You have your academy, you give them a context with what this topic was about and then the exact name of the course. You could even include an image to provide additional context of what that topic was about. It could be a person, a crafter doing their thing, or maybe it’s a symbolic or a diagram image of a particular subfield.
Student Name, Instructor Name
Of course, you’re going to have the student name, you’re going to have the instructor name.
Training Details Like Hours, Tests
You might have training details like potentially how many lessons or how many hours or whether they took tests. You could use all that stuff to just add proof and validity that, yeah, the person didn’t just watch three videos, three short videos, but there was some amount of time there, and you could potentially add up the total training time of not just your, your videos, maybe reviewing the resources. You can come up with an estimate, and that could give you a better total time of investment that your students made.
Date Completed or Expired
Of course, you’re going to include a date of when this course was completed. You might even have an expiration date, if it makes sense for your field, or maybe not, if you want to be a good sport. Let your students extract more value from it as opposed to expiring it.
Unless you’re teaching something that really does change every ten years or five years. In which case you potentially encourage continuing learning. All right, that’s the high level how-to benefits for students. You know how you set it up, you’re going to choose your tech or decide to go manual. Then you’re going to figure out the key fields that you want to create those certificates.
Example: Certificates for Online Courses
Certificate of Completion for a Hair Styling Course for Television & Film
Now let’s check out an example. So, say you’re teaching hairstyling, maybe hairstyling for television and film. You have a whole academy on styling hair, cool hairdos, bed hair, night hair, party hair, and all that. You’re getting good at hair styling for TV and movies.
You have a whole course, you got videos on hairstyles. You got products. You got a list, you got a community where they help each other, maybe a job board, all this fun stuff. You got a whole course and you decide that you wanted to go higher end, you might be charging a certain price and now you want to charge a lot more.
Maybe you were charging $300. You want to start charging $500. Okay, so you come up with a couple of ideas to add value first of all. You change the value. Did that slow down your purchasing? When you just change your price, sometimes you can change your price and it doesn’t affect the number of students that you’re getting every month.
But if it does or you want to accelerate more, then you might want to think about ways to add value to your hairstyling course. So you might come up with an ultimate guide of where to buy high end products, certain looks. Maybe you have a couple of cheat sheets that you provide or ebooks or however you frame it.
Key Certificate Fields
You might also decide to add a certificate here that they can hang up while they’re doing hair. They want to show off their certificate because they’re in person. They’re not online. So they might as well leverage that certificate So you’re cool.
So let’s go ahead and add that certificate and you start thinking about the fields you’re going to do and how you’re going to do it. You’re looking at your system and you see that there’s this feature deep deep in there. You may not have known about it you kind of heard about it, but you didn’t know how to connect it, so you or a tech team like artsycourseexperts helps you set all this stuff up and get all the integrations going, get the automatic emails going, set up the art assets, et cetera.
So you start to set up your platform. Let’s just say that your hair styling courses are on. You start to set up Thinkific and make sure that all the certificates are there. You configure it per course, the metadata, all the information you’re going to need.
Headline
First thing is you’re going to set up all those key certificate fields, maybe, what’s the headline? What’s your official academy name? Maybe not the short version, the longer name, the more formal name of your academy.
Academy Logo
You’re going to also have the academy logo. What’s the name of your school? You’re going to have the official name of the course. Now, remember this is a little different than SEO or the thumbnails that you use to sell. Now you want to go a little longer, a little more formal, a little more bragging, if you will, to blow out that academy name, the course name. You’re gonna want a field for the student. So when they signed up you may have had a first name, a last name instead of just one big edit box.
You’re gonna want to make sure that those fields map to the descriptions that are being used inside the certificate. So often there might be codes like brackets, F name or L name for first name and last name. You’re going to want to test that out as well, that student when the certificate comes out, it’s correct.
It doesn’t just butcher their name or drop the middle name or a hyphen. So you’re going to want to test all that out. I recommend all creative teachers have a test account, like a QA or a tester or, fake student app. Then use those to verify that everything’s working out.
Instructor Name
You’re going to want to put your instructor name. You may have been casual in your course, but maybe for the certificate you want to have your first name, last initial or add anything else. You have a master’s in fine arts since you’re a creative teacher or you are certified.
So you have a comma with a couple of your certificates that you have. You’re going to want to think about how your instructor’s name appears. On these certificates as well.
Training Time
In some cases, there might be more than one instructor, So how do you frame that up? Then you might also decide to add some training details, like the number of hours that were the number of hours that were required for this certificate, or even the dates, maybe the date completed. Not the date it started.
Some of these fields are going to be hard coded. Others will be automatic. So you’re going to want to make sure that those parameters are working correctly and they’re transferred from that first check in and onboarding all the way through to the end when you’re creating those certificates. Then you’re either going to use your technology to create these Certificates, these PDFs not only create but also deliver right to email to print out.
You could print them out yourself in a nice service. You could have glossy. You could even frame it and mail them to your customers. Obviously, that doesn’t scale up for the right price and the high kind of a VIP master class. You could potentially do that for the right price.
You’re either going to use technology to create these final art assets, the PDF for that certificate, or you’re going to do it low tech. You’re going to have one of your slides, keynote, illustrator, whatever, where you can, even Canva. Where you can pop in, create that certificate, and you could then create a PDF or a JPEG or a PNG.
Then you could figure out how to deliver that to your student, whether you’re emailing it, uploading it online as a message. Hey, “congratulations. Here’s your certificate”. However you decide to do that kind of final delivery and handholding, depending on your level of course. Whether you’re dealing with thousands of students, dozens at a time, everybody’s gonna do a different procedure.
You might start off manually and then scale, or you might start off with automatic systems, but then go manual but very high end. It’s up to you depending on how you want to frame your academy. At a high level offering certificates provides more value and helps students with their next steps.
Frequently Asked Questions on Why Online Courses Should Offer Certificates?
📌Summary – Why Online Courses Should Offer Certificates?
Finally, offering certificates for online courses provides tangible benefits for both learners and online teachers. For students and e-learners, certificates are a proper recognition of their hard work and acquired skills, enhancing their resumes and boosting their credibility in a competitive job market. They also offer motivation and a sense of achievement, encouraging course completion.
For online course teachers, providing certificates can increase the number of e-learners, improve student engagement, and improve their reputation as credible online course teachers. As the demand for flexible, accessible education grows, certificates add a valuable layer of validation to the online learning experience.
Here are the top things you need to know about certificates for your online courses:
- A certificate can be physical or digital
- A certificate makes students proud of their investment
- By issuing certificates, you get to charge more for your courses
- You also add more value to what you offer your students
- You can configure your certificates manually or automatically
You should be a little more smarter now. Thanks for hanging out!
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