LearnDash

Gold stars and extra credit are fun ways to motivate students and reward them for their hard work—but they don’t exactly speak to credentials. Certificates, however, give students something to work towards and serve as a tangible testament to their academic achievements. They also just look great hanging on the wall.

In this step-by-step guide, we’ll show you how to improve student engagement using LearnDash certificates. Keep that certificate seal handy—with these eight cool ways to use LearnDash certificates, you’re going to need it!

What You’ll Need

Just like your students need tools for learning, you’re going to need some tools for awarding certificates and improving student engagement. Sadly, a laser pointer won’t do but we think you’ll find these plugins and add-ons much more helpful—and far less hazardous to your eyesight. They’re both easy to use and have a free version you can demo before making an investment.

Uncanny Toolkit Pro

Uncanny Toolkit Pro is the #1 must-have add-on for LearnDash websites—probably because it’s a masterclass in “Saving Time for Your LMS”. In addition to features such as course dashboards and personalized logins, Toolkit improves the functionality of LearnDash certificates to make administration easy and improve the student experience. Enhance your certification process with modules to preview certificates, automatically email them to students and staff or let your students show off their credentials with a certificates widget.

Feel free to check out the full list of features and the Pro pricing schedule by clicking here. We’ll be using Toolkit Pro features in our examples but that doesn’t mean you can’t download the free plugin and try out core modules.

Uncanny Automator Pro

If you’re running an LMS WordPress website, then Uncanny Automator is the best way to save yourself time and money. Connect your various apps and plugins for enhanced functionality, automate repetitive tasks and workflows and eliminate bloat from your website. Specifically, Automator packs so many LearnDash triggers and actions into even the free version of the plugin that you’ll feel like you’re cheating on an exam.

With Automator’s no-code, click-and-configure interface, you’ll be able to email LearnDash certificates to anyone on your contact list for just about any interaction that occurs on your website. In case that wasn’t enough, you can connect your LearnDash certification process to databases like Airtable, CRM tools like ActiveCampaign, ecommerce plugins like WooCommerce or even membership plugins like Restrict Content Pro.

Definitely try out the free Automator plugin and its dozens of LearnDash actions and triggers. Then, when you’ve gotten the hang of it, upgrade to Automator Pro to make the most of your LMS.

In addition to Toolkit Pro and Automator Pro, we’ll feature other commonly-used plugins and apps such as WooCommerce and The Events Calendar but these are only optional.

7 Cool Ways to Award LearnDash Certificates

Now that you’re all set up with the right tools, let’s look at these seven cool ways to award LearnDash certificates so that your students can start decorating their walls with their credentials.

1. Email LearnDash Certificates with Toolkit Pro

Uncanny Toolkit Pro allows you to email PDF copies of certificates to students and administrators with just a click. Here’s how it’s done:

Step 1: From your WordPress Admin Sidebar, navigate to Uncanny Toolkit > Modules.

Step 2: Scroll down to the modules titled Send Course Certificates by Email and Send Quiz Certificates by Email or type “certificates” into the search bar.

Step 3: Toggle the button in the upper right-hand corner to the “On” position.

Step 4: Click Settings to configure the module and draft the email. You can then decide who will receive the email and draft the title and content using dynamic data to personalize the message.

Step 5: Once you’ve configured the settings and drafted your email message, click Save module. Your students will now receive automated emails with a PDF copy of their certificate, ready for printing and framing!

2. Email LearnDash Certificates with Shortcode and Magic

Using some “copy-and-paste” shortcode and a little magic, you can put the power of printing certificates in your students’ hands—or, more accurately, at their fingertips. Upon completion of a course, present your students with a button to click if they would like to receive an emailed copy of their certificate. Here’s how to cast the spell:

Step1: From your WordPress Admin Sidebar, navigate to Automator > Add New. In the pop-up window that appears, select Logged-in users.

Step 2: Name your recipe something that makes it easy to remember, like… Certified Magician.

Step 3: From the menu of available integrations, click Automator.

Step 4: From the drop-down list that appears, select A user clicks a magic button.

Step 5: Your trigger should now look like this:

Copy the bracketed text [acutomator_button id=” xxxxx “ “ label=”Click here”] and save it to your clipboard. We’re going to embed this shortcode in the Classic Editor of the desired course.

Step 6: From your WordPress Admin Sidebar, navigate to LearnDash > Courses and click Edit beneath the course for which you would like to offer certificates to students for course completion.

Step 7: In the Classic Editor screen, click the Add button icon then click Shortcode and paste the magic button shortcode (the bracketed text we copied from Step 5) into the box.

Step 8: Next, we’ll need some additional shortcode so that the Automator magic button only appears for students who have completed the course. Thankfully, LearnDash has a library of preset shortcodes for us to use. Click here for the LearnDash Course Complete shortcode or copy the bracketed text: so that the finished block should now look like this:

The Automator magic button will now only appear to students who have completed the course. You can add a new block above this one, describing the purpose and function of the Automator magic button or you change the label itself to something more descriptive by simply replacing “Click here”.

Step 10: Return to your Automator recipe by navigating to Automator > All recipes and clicking Edit beneath Certified Magician.

Step 11: In the Actions panel, click Add action then click LearnDash.

From the drop-down list that appears, select Send a certificate.

Use tokens such as User email, User first name, etc. to send, draft and customize your email.

Note: When formatting the Certificate body, do not use shortcodes. As in the image above, only use tokens by clicking on the asterisk symbol. You can use these tokens to include information such as dates, user first and last names and courses.

Step 12: In the upper right-hand corner, toggle the recipe from Draft to Live. It should look like this:

“Abracadabra!” Just like that, your students can receive their certificate upon course completion with just a click.

3. Sell LearnDash Certificates with Automator and WooCommerce

Learning should be—and often is—totally free. But credentials often come with costs. With Automator and WooCommerce, you can offer paid LearnDash certificates for free courses. Here’s the best way to sell those certificates:

Step 1: The first thing you’ll want to do is to create a WooCommerce product. You’ll then connect this product to a LearnDash certificate using Automator.

From your WordPress Admin Sidebar, navigate to Products > Add New. In the Product data panel, set the product to Virtual.

Finish configuring your product as you’d like by setting the price, image(s), upsells, cross-sells, etc. Once the product is to your liking, click Publish.

Step 2: In these next steps, we’ll create a recipe that connects your WooCommerce product to a LearnDash certificate. We’ll add an additional trigger so that only the students who have earned the certificate will receive it.

From your WordPress Admin Sidebar, navigate to Automator > Add New and select Logged-in users.

Step 3: Name your recipe. We’ve named this recipe WooCommerce-LearnDash: Certificate Order.

Step 4: In the Triggers panel, click LearnDash. From the drop-down list, select A user completes a course. Select the course associated with the certificate and click Save.

Step 5: Still in the Triggers panel, click Add trigger then WooCommerce. From the drop-down list, select A user completes, pays for, lands on a thank you page for an order with a product.

Step 6: Automator will prompt you to configure the rest of the trigger settings. We selected completes then chose our newly created product from the drop-down list. Your finished triggers should look something like this:

Step 7: In the Actions panel, click Add action then click LearnDash. From the drop-down list, select Send a certificate and configure the rest of the settings. When you’re finished, click Save. Your action should look like this:

Step 8: Toggle the recipe from Draft to Live. Here’s what the final recipe should look like:

Step 9: Students can sometimes be forgetful—because their heads are full of knowledge. If you wanted to ensure that your students get the recognition they deserve, you could create a second recipe to send an email upon course completion with a link for them to purchase their certificate. Grab the product url from the product page and paste it into the Email body field of your Automator action. That recipe might look something like this:

You could also use Automator’s tagging actions with CRMs like Groundhogg, Mailchimp or Mailpoet to send even more compelling emails and boost conversions.

4. Award LearnDash Certificates for Live Event Attendance

Who doesn’t love to have a perfect attendance record? You can use Automator to send certificates to attendees of live events as a way for your students to remember the occasion. Here’s how to send certificates as souvenirs of successful events:

Step 1: From your WordPress Admin Sidebar, navigate to Automator > Add New and select Logged-in users.

Step 2: Name your recipe. We’ve named this recipe Special Event Attendance Certificate.

Step 3: In the Actions panel, click The Event Calendar and select A user attends an event. Automator will prompt you to select your event from a drop-down list. After you’ve selected your event, click Save.

Step 4: In the Actions panel, click Add action then click LearnDash. From the drop-down list, select Send a certificate and configure the rest of the settings. When you’re finished, click Save.

Step 5: Toggle your recipe from Draft to Live. The finished recipe should look like this:

Step 6: Concerned about event certificates only being available by email and not from the website? One solution would be to create a hidden course with an associated course certificate. Then, in our event attendance recipe, change the action so it completes the hidden course instead of sending the certificate via email.

This way, the Toolkit Pro module to send a certificate can provide it by email, and the Show Certificates module in the free version of Uncanny Toolkit can show event certificates to students!

5. Credit & Course Group Based Certificates

Credit where credit is due—which, in this case, means awarding certificates. If you have purchased the Uncanny Continuing Education Credits plugin, you can award certificates for groups of courses as well as for credits earned. Here’s how to claim the credit:

Step 1: After downloading the Uncanny Continuing Education Credit plugin, navigate Uncanny CEU > Settings.

Step 2: Scroll down to the section labeled Certificate Email Settings. Check the boxes next to Enable Multi Course certificate and Enable CEU Credits certificate. You can also choose to send the certificate to Site Administrators and Group Leaders as a prudent recordkeeping practice.

Step 3: From your WordPress Admin Sidebar, navigate to LearnDash > Certificates. Select the certificate you would like to award based on credit or course groups or create a new one. On the right-hand side of the Classic Editor, you’ll see options to award the certificate based on CEU credits accumulated or courses completed.

Once you’ve finished configuring your certificate, click Publish.

Step 4: Finally, navigate to LearnDash > Courses. From the Classic Editor within each course, you can set the CEU value. If you’re not certain how to do this—or would like to “continue” your Continuing Education Credits learning—click here.

6. Award LearnDash Certificates for Course Series with Automator

If you don’t have the Uncanny Continuing Education Credits plugin, you can still award certificates to students who complete a series of courses using Automator. It’s a lot easier than building a curriculum, we promise.

This recipe won’t differ much from previous set-ups using Automator. The only difference is that you’ll add multiple triggers; one for each course. The finished recipe should look something like this:

7. Award LearnDash Certificates for Offline Learning Activities

Why just keep the classroom online? You can leverage the power of LearnDash, Automator and Uncanny CEUs to make changes in the real world! Combine Automator with any form-building plugin or web application such as WPForms or Forminator to award credits and send certificates following offline learning events.

Step 1: You’ll need some method of verifying attendance for your offline learning activities—this will serve as the trigger for our Automator recipe. If you already have a verification process, you can skip to the next step.

For our verification process, we’ve created a form. This form can be a simple registration form or a more complex form with information only the attendees would know. It’s up to you to configure as you’d like.

Step 2: Create a new recipe in Automator, select Logged-in users and choose an appropriate title.

Step 3: In the Triggers panel, configure your trigger according to your verification process. In our example, we’ve selected our form-building integration and the form associated with our offline learning activity. Click Save.

Step 4: In the Actions panel, click Uncanny CEUs then select Award a number of custom CEUs to the user. Automator will prompt you to fill out the date, description and number of CEUs to award. When you’re finished, click Save.

Step 5: Create a second recipe to send certificates or mark a hidden course complete (and send the certificate with Uncanny Toolkit) based on the total number of CEUs a student has earned. That recipe might look something like this:

Keep Certifying

For students, certificates are as good as gold medals… if there was an Academic Olympics. And tools such as Uncanny Automator and Uncanny Toolkit help you leverage the certification process to improve your LMS and, ultimately, your students’ experience.

Try out a few of the examples we provided in this post and we promise you’ll spend less time administrating and more time educating. Then, when you’re ready, upgrade to the All Access Pass and get even more Uncanny plugins and add-ons, not to mention industry-leading support. Now that’s certifiably cool.

Today we pushed updates to 3 of our plugins (Uncanny Groups, Toolkit Pro and Tin Canny) and a fourth plugin update is coming tomorrow. While most of the changes are small fixes and improvements, there are some larger enhancements that deserve a bit more attention.

Uncanny Toolkit Pro for LearnDash

Perhaps the most interesting update is that the plugin, and specifically the Import Users module, no long requires LearnDash. This was done primarily to allow Uncanny Automator users to run imports that trigger actions as part of our new support for running actions on users in bulk. The Toolkit itself isn’t moving away from LearnDash, but this will be a big win for Automator users that aren’t necessarily using LearnDash.

The Enhanced CSV Reports module doubles the number of custom usermeta columns to 10. You can now run some very big reports with this tool with a lot of custom user profile data.

The Enhanced Course Grid module has the most changes, including all of the following:

• There’s a new “hide_title” attribute to turn off course titles in the grid.
• Multiple categories can now be defined for inclusion in the shortcode or block, separated by commas
• There are 7 new action hooks, including the following: uo_course_after_short_description, uo_course_before_short_description, uo_course_before_course_title, uo_course_after_course_title, uo_course_after_featured_image, uo_course_after_grid_ribbon_price, and uo_course_after_grid_ribbon_text.

Overall, these changes add significantly more flexibility to what’s an already very flexible model for outputting course objects in a grid.

Uncanny Groups

The big new feature in today’s Uncanny Groups release is support for switching products in someone’s cart based on quantity. Why is this important? In the current model, when a user buys a group product, it always creates a group and adds them as a Group Leader. This is true even if a user buys a single seat for the group. What this means is that there must be 2 workflows for course purchase, one for a group, one for personal use by a user. A site might then have a “Buy for myself” button as well as a “Buy for a group” button on a course, since they are different products. Having to make this decision is an extra step though, and buyers are often confused by it.

The new option to swap products allows sites to present a single product to prospective buyers without having to choose whether it’s for a group or themselves. Instead, if the quantity is 1, the system (optionally) assumes the purchase is for themselves and can swap in a Course or other product. If the quantity is greater than 1, the Group License product is used. When a quantity is selected and the product added to the cart, the swap (if the quantity is 1) is automatic.

Here’s what it looks like when editing a group product:

For developers, the Uncanny Groups 4.2 release adds 2 new actions: ulgm_before_license_group_is_inserted and ulgm_after_license_group_is_inserted.

There are also 3 new filters: ulgm_license_group_linked_course_id, ulgm_license_group_courses_linked_in_order and ulgm_include_user_direct_enrolled_courses (the latter for the Group Progress report).

Other Improvements

The Tin Canny release adds new support for negative scores in the individual quiz report as well as support for SCORM module uploads that may be missing requirement elements, like a title.

Across all plugin releases, there are also various compatibility fixes for LearnDash 3.6, PHP 8 and WPML. Yes, while our plugins have been translation friendly for years, we are starting to also add explicit WPML support where compatibility issues are reported.

Version 3.5 of the Uncanny Toolkit for LearnDash was released today with one very important addition: new support for Two Factor Authentication (2FA). We have had a number of requests to improve security options for our login module and we’re pleased to now support a direction integration with WP 2FA, a popular two-factor authentication plugin for WordPress.

Easy 2FA for WordPress sites

What this new integration means is that it’s easier than ever to integrate the flexible, clean login forms in the Uncanny Toolkit with the additional security of the WP 2FA plugin. It’s the best of both worlds. Using both plugins together, you can now:

• Require some or all users to authenticate with 2FA (including setting rules by role)
• Allow users to add a secondary login check using an email or supported 2FA app

Beyond the additional account security, LearnDash site owners may appreciate that this additional security measure makes it much harder for users to share WordPress accounts.

Here’s what the login process looks like for end users when they try to sign in:

The use of two-factor authentication is of course completely optional, but we’ve made it as easy as possible to install the WP 2FA plugin should you want to enable it. From the Front End Login module settings page in Uncanny Toolkit > Modules, there’s a 1-click install option at the very bottom of the settings. Once installed, the Front End Login module will confirm it’s active and add an easy link to set up 2FA settings.

Please note that this is an integration only, meaning we have added easy plugin installation, configuration and style for the 2FA plugin, but the 2FA behaviours, text and other settings remain with the other plugin.

Other changes in Uncanny Toolkit 3.5

In anticipation of the upcoming Uncanny Automator 3.0 release, we have made it easier than ever to add Automator recipes from the Toolkit. Users can get started with a new one-click install process so you don’t even have to leave your Toolkit settings.

This release also includes a number of updates related to LearnDash 3.4.x changes. We have seen a lot of changes in LearnDash over the last 2 months related to LearnDash 3.4 fixes, and a handful of recent changes have caused issues that require updates on our side. For this reason, the Uncanny Toolkit 3.5 release is highly recommend for all users of LearnDash 3.4.0 and above, especially if you use our Topics Autocomplete Lessons module.

We try to avoid Friday releases where we can, but with the upcoming holiday weekend in Canada and some exciting changes from LearnDash, we couldn’t wait to get version 3.7 of the Uncanny Toolkit Pro plugin out. It’s a big release with several really compelling new features.

Group Drip notification changes

We do need to start the list of new features with a change that Group Drip users may need to make on their sites.

LearnDash is releasing version 1.5 of their Notifications plugin next week, which is a big overhaul and improvement. That’s great news, but because of how it was rearchitected, it does break compatibility with existing notifications linked to our Group Drip module. Any current notifications on sites set up to alert users when lessons are available to the group will stop working, but there is good news: we have a new trigger available to support Group Drip notifications.

If you upgrade to LearnDash Notifications 1.5 and want notifications to be sent to group members when lessons become available via group drip, you must create new notifications with this new trigger: “A scheduled lesson is available to user with Uncanny Drip by Group”. If you don’t use group drip notifications, no changes are necessary.

Custom usermeta in LearnDash CSV reports

We keep adding more column options to LearnDash reports, and in today’s 3.7 release we’re adding up to 3 new columns that can output any user data you want. If you store custom fields for users in your system, like maybe a department, manager name, job title, whatever, now you can include columns with those records in LearnDash CSV reports using the Enhanced LearnDash CSV Reports module.

Here’s what it looks like:

To add these extra columns you will need to know the key for the record in the usermeta table, but if you’re storing custom fields you probably know what keys to use. If you’re not sure, look at whatever is capturing that record (perhaps a form or checkout process) and see if it shows the usermeta key for the record you need.

Certificates in LearnDash Transcripts

We made some really interesting LearnDash Transcript module changes in this release, and before any current users panic, these new records are optional. We know you’ll want to use them, but they can be turned on and off.

First up is the addition of a Certificate column to the Transcript output. It does exactly what you expect; if the column is shown and the user has an associated course certificate, we show an icon with a link to the certificate. This is a really handy way for users to retrieve their certificates, including from courses in which they’re no longer enrolled but do have a completion record.

The Certificate column is automatically hidden from the print view, where it wouldn’t make sense.

Custom Credits in LearnDash Transcripts

We’ve been hard at work lately with amazing new features for our Continuing Education Credits plugin, and now that it’s easy to track custom credits, we wanted to make it easy for users to see their consolidated training records. In Toolkit Pro 3.7, we have added the ability to include custom learning credits in student transcript. If our Continuing Education Credits is installed and enabled, and a user has been awarded credits, we will now (optionally) add new rows for those records.

Please note that because records like scores and steps are not applicable for custom credit records, we output “n/a” in those columns for custom records.

Group expiration shortcode

We have offered the Expire LearnDash Group module for quite some time, but we always relied on email notifications to let users know when it was expiring. This made planning difficult for Group Leaders and members, so in today’s release we have added a new shortcode. Here are some examples of usage:

[uo_group_expiration_in] //Show countdown to expiry date if set and user is only part of 1 group
[uo_group_expiration_in group-id="xx"] //Shows countdown to expiry date if set and user is part of the associated group
[uo_group_expiration_in pre-text=""] //Override default "Group Access Expires in" text in shortcode output
[uo_group_expiration_in group-id="" pre-text=""] //Combine the above attributes

When the Expire Group module is enabled this shortcode is available automatically. The default text to include is set from the module settings:

Other changes

As always, all new features, updates and fixes are included in the changelog. Two notable additions are support for Single Page Course settings for non-admins (like Instructors in the Instructor Role plugin by Wisdm Labs) and outputting course-level quizzes in the Course Dashboard module.

We’re excited to announce that today’s Uncanny Toolkit for LearnDash release includes some pretty big Front End Login changes (and we wanted to beat the upcoming Toolkit Pro and Automator 2.10 that announcements that will steal the thunder!). The Front End Login module has gotten increasingly capable, to the point that we see people using it on WordPress sites even if they’re not using LearnDash. Today’s release adds even more reasons to use it for login on any WordPress site.

Changes to user verification

We added the ability to verify users before login was allowed a very long time ago, but the module never had a great way to manage email notifications when users were approved for access. With user verification enabled, site users would have to be approved by an administrator before they could sign in, but how would the admin control the user notification and content?

The Uncanny Toolkit 3.4.1 release adds a new customizable email system (see below) as well as an easy way to suppress user verification emails entirely. Emails can also now include tokens (variables) with information that might be useful to approved users, like site name and the user’s name.

Login redirect changes

Ever wish users could sign in using a modal and the page would just update for the user without redirecting the user somewhere else? It’s been a common request, so the new 3.4.1 release adds the ability to ignore other login redirect behaviours when the modal option for login is used.

In other words, maybe you have a dedicated login page on your site and you want users that sign in from that page to land on a student dashboard when they sign in. But maybe on a sales page for members you want them to sign in and stay on that page, only with the right content for the user once signed in. Now you can do that; here’s how:

Still not enough flexibility for login behaviours? Now there’s a new filter that allows developers to make even more overrides; here’s what’s now included:

$login_form_args = apply_filters('uo_frontend_login_args', $login_form_args);

Other changes

The 3.4.1 release includes a few other changes for Front End Login and other modules.

We added the ability for other plugins to show error messages related to login in our Front End Login form. This came up as part of an investigation into why Peepso was blocking logins with our plugin that we traced to a password security parameter in its settings (which was throwing an error, we just weren’t outputting it).

The module also includes better support for /wp-login.php redirects. Previously, attempts to visit that page would be redirected to whatever was set as the login page using this module. While it worked without issue, our redirect dropped any querystring records from the URL when it redirected  users; now the full URLs are preserved.

Those are the Toolkit 3.4.1 highlights, but make sure to check out the changelog to get the full list of updates.

The Front End Login module was one of the first things we created for the free Uncanny Toolkit for LearnDash plugin. It gave LearnDash users a simple, free tool for students to use when logging in, and for us (as our business was heavily focused on consulting at the time) it was one more way that we could make site development a lot more efficient.

A lot has changed since we first introduced the module, including LearnDash adding its own login forms. There are still a lot of situations with the login form in our Toolkit is the best fit (and what we always use on sites we build), and with today’s Uncanny Toolkit 3.3 release we’re making the module even better.

Introducing Modal Login Windows

With the latest Toolkit release, you can add this shortcode anywhere on your site you want: [uo_login_modal]. That will create a link (that can also be styled as a button) that pops up a login window. No more devoting precious site real estate to giant login forms! Here’s what it looks like:

There are new options in the Front End Login module settings to change the text of the label, whether or not to dim the background when the modal is active, and text for the link to return to the page. (Make sure to turn on the new AJAX support and use the Boxed with shadow template if you want to use modal login forms.)

The new addition is incredibly powerful and flexible, it makes it practical to add login forms anywhere, but what about menu access? As long as the Log In/Log Out Links module is turned on, you’ll see a new option under Appearance > Menus in /wp-admin/ to add a modal login there:

Login forms get AJAX support

If you’ve ever wanted users to sign in but keep the page experience intact, now you can. There’s a new AJAX option (it’s disabled by default) in the Front End Login settings that allows users to submit the login form via AJAX instead.  This option currently only works with the Boxed with shadow template.

Note that this option must be enabled if you want to use the new modal login forms.

Expanded Resume support

Ever wish you could add the Resume button link in the Toolkit to a menu? Maybe somewhere else on your site, or even in your code, where a button might not make sense?

The new [uo_learndash_resume_link] shortcode returns a Resume link for users instead of a button, so you can include it in a menu or wherever else it might make sense. And with the url_only=”yes” attribute, the shortcode will return the full URL for the user, rather than a link with Resume text.

The 3.3 release includes several other changes behind the scenes as well (it has been 3 months since we last published a release!) that improve translation support and efficiency.

If you’re not yet a Toolkit user, now is a great time to give the free version a try!