New Module - Certification

New Module - Certification

by Ralph Blakeslee -
Number of replies: 16

I am looking for some help in developing a new module, which I have tentatively called Certification.  The purpose of this module is to provide the participant/student with a printable certification when the course has been completed.  The module would be applicable to either the Weekly Format, or Topic Format type of course. 

I am just starting to learn PHP, so I guess I am looking for someone to act as my "mentor" who can point me in the right direction and give me a lift when I am stuck.  Certainly if anyone elese would like to work on this project I would be glad to help organize it.

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In reply to Ralph Blakeslee

Re: New Module - Certification

by Marilyn Fleming -

What kind of mentoring do you have in mind?

I, too, am working on a certification-related project. I'm new to Moodle, but have a bit of PHP experience and a lot of programming experience in several other languages. My heavy experience is desktop and Windows, but I've also done both Perl and PHP on a couple of virtual servers.

I was thinking about just writing an external program to run directly against the Moodle db, pull a list of student, course, and grade, and export it to a file. Then import the file into a central certification db on another computer.

Are you looking for a fancy printed Certificate, or just bland text stuff?

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In reply to Marilyn Fleming

Re: New Module - Certification

by Jenny Watt -

I found a site that offers a free PHP PDF creator:

http://www.fpdf.org/

and played around with it and created a PDF certificate. I am hoping to get it integrated with Moodle. I was thinking of making it a module so that after the class was completed it would check the student grade and then generate a certificate they could download.

Keep me posted on your project!

Jenny

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In reply to Jenny Watt

Re: New Module - Certification

by Patrik Nilsson -

Might be tricky to integrate because of the licens..
Moodle developer can use it but but teqachers and schools can not use it for administration purpose so you can not use it to generate a certificate without buying a licence.

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In reply to Patrik Nilsson

Re: New Module - Certification

by Marilyn Fleming -
I don't think the PDF tool she linked to requires a license.

There are three big issues to look at for incorporating PDF creation directly in Moodle. One is the license aspect that you mention. Another is the quality aspect. Some of the free things are pretty much limited to  emitting plain text in Courier font. Not good enough for a certificate. Another is whether they are cross-platform (Windows/*nix). And, do ed sites already have GhostScript installed? I think it can do the job if you can get it installed. Problem is, you can't install it on a virtual host.

My experience is the good PDF tools either require an (expensive) license or are hard to install.

The one she cites may be the exception to the rule. I played with it a bit on Windows a while back, and it looked pretty good. Ultimately we went with a commercial solution, though.
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In reply to Patrik Nilsson

Re: New Module - Certification

by Marilyn Fleming -

If you want a a real hack PDF certificate solution that doesn't require any licenses and has no installation or platform issues, this might work:

Acrobat reader will read and straight postscript (.PS) as well as PDF.

Postscript is (or can be) an ASCII format.

Use a graphics editor or word processor to design a boiler-plate cert with dummy fields for name, date, etc. Print it to a Postscript File. Then use php to substring the dummy fields, and send the user the modified PS. He/she can open it in Acrobat Reader and print it.

It's also possible to write PS from a scratch, with a regular text editor. This would probably be the best way to do it if the cert is relatively simple. If anybody has an example of what they might want, I would be willing to take a crack at doing the PS boiler plate.

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In reply to Ralph Blakeslee

Re: New Module - Certification

by Jenny Watt -

I have gotten two emails on this today and since I have a student that is getting ready to need a certificate I plan to write something for my own use and since there seems to be such a demand, I may as well make it a module that other may be able to use.

So, post how you would like to see it work here and let's come up with some ideas.

It looks like we have some good ideas for a PHP editor and I have a sample certificate created, but how do we want to get it to the students? Should it be tied to grades? Do we want add a link to the main course module that will appear when they have met the requirements for certificates? Should we email the certificate or have it available in the course to print?

Once we get some ideas I will see what I can come up!

Thanks!

Jenny

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In reply to Ralph Blakeslee

Re: New Module - Certification

by Marc G -

Certification Module Considerations:

Course Completion - What defines a course as being completed.
(1) Is this configured by grades generated from using the quiz module...or, 
(2) Does the facilitator simply state, student "xyz" has completed the course..

Certification
(1) 1 course = Certification, or...
(2) Multiple courses = Certification
(2) More than one available certification.  E.g. 3 courses are a Level I Certification, the next 3 courses are a Level II.  These grouping of courses are defined in Moodle as Categories.

How Would Students Access Certifications

For my own project, in looking at Certification/Course Completion, I see the need for a type of student portal.  A Global Page independent of any given course.  Simply, a page that that shows Student Progress through courses as well as info pertinent to a given student.

 

Such a Student Portal would have:

-         Student information when logged in as yourself (e.g. http://moodle.org/user/view.php?id=7061&course=5)

-         My Courses

-         Progress through those courses

-         Course Completed

-         Certifications (pdf) available for printing

(I would personally have both capabilities to have certifications emailed as well as accessing from website.

-         Etc. Any "Personal" Student info...

 

Just some thoughts

 

Marc

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In reply to Marc G

Re: New Module - Certification

by Jenny Watt -

Some great ideas, Marc! Thanks!

I like the idea of the teacher setting the certificate option. That works for my purposes better than grades. I was thinking of adding it to the grades page the teacher sees. A nice check box or something perhaps. Then for the student add a "print certificate" link on their grades page that would display the PDF image that they could print or save. That would require them to access the course one more time after they have completed everything. Hmmm - maybe emailing would be better.

I should be able to get the basic module written by next week. I will post and see what y'all think!

Jenny

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In reply to Jenny Watt

Re: New Module - Certification

by Ferlin Scarborough -
I have been anixiously awaiting this module, I have a need to print certificates, and was just thinking about designing one in a pdf file manually and editing the student and course information for each student then emailing it, all by hand.  If there was a module to aid in this, I would appreciate it highly, please let me know the progress on this.

Thanks In Advance.

Ferlin Scarborough.

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In reply to Ferlin Scarborough

Re: New Module - Certification

by Grant McWilliams -
I would like to adapt this module to making a pdf of each section of a topics based course. I write about 70 pages of text for each class that I teach. I would like the weeks lesson to be printable. Currently I do it by hand by copying and pasting into Openoffice.org 1.1 then exporting as a pdf, uploading it and linking it to the page. I would like this automatic. If I change my classnotes the pdf that they print would automatically reflect the changes.

Grant
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In reply to Jenny Watt

Re: New Module - Certification

by W Page -

Hi!

This webmaster did some work in phpNuke so a site visitor could generate a pdf page as well as a printer freindly one of news and sections.
ClaudioDemarinis Website
http://claudiodemarinis.it

The downloads are from SourceForge.  Although the site is in Itallian he does provide english instructions with the files.

News in PDF
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/pdf4phpnuke/pdfpdfnewsprinter.zip?download

Sections in PDF
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/pdf4phpnuke/pdfsections.zip?download

He also references FPDF which has been noted in a few posts above,
http://www.fpdf.org

I am still learning about PHP so I do not know if this info will help or not.  But, I hope it does.

WP1

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In reply to Jenny Watt

Re: New Module - Certification

by W Page -

Hello!

I am not a programmer but I have been looking around for ways to make pages into PDF documents.  In my travels I found this,

HTML Form to Dynamic PDF
Generates a PDF file dynamically on-the-fly based on the information from a HTML form and server-side calculations.
http://www.fastio.com/forms/form1040.html#DemoHere

Is this more of what you were looking for?

Also check these out,

X. ClibPDF functions Introduction
http://php.benscom.com/manual/en/ref.cpdf.php

Kinati 2PDF Converter 1.0  ???
http://download.com.com/3000-2064-10248232.html?tag=lst-0-10

I also listed some other resources in this thread.

WP1

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In reply to Jenny Watt

Re: New Module - Certification

by H C -

Hi Jenny:

I am searching for a module for certification and found this thread.  I guess a new module must have been developed quite while.  Would you please direct me to the place that I can download and try it?  Thanks!

Helen

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