Custom certificate - recurring certificates

Custom certificate - recurring certificates

by John Breen -
Number of replies: 4

I know this is probably an old issue, but I haven't seen a resolution from it. We have been using your excellent mod on our Moodle site for a number of years now but have also had a problem with dates on our certificates.

The courses we run are mandatory and need to be redone by our users annually, biannually...etc. As a result, when users redo the courses and try to print the certificate for the new attempt, they get the certificate that was generated the last time they completed the course.

Just for some background, our courses consist of a SCORM package created in Articulate Storyline which gives the user a grade for a quiz built into the SCORM package. The details of the grade...etc are then passed back to Moodle and the user then prints a certificate based on the score attained

Our workaround has been to delete the old certificate from the users account. Is there any way you could tell me where this information is stored in the Moodle database, and I can run a MariaDB script to clear down this table on an hourly basis to prevent this happening.

We initially only used Moodle for about 10 or so courses, but with COVID-19, it's use has mushroomed and with over 1500 users regularly using it, this has become a bit of an administrative nightmare.

Any light you could shed on this would be greatly appreciated, and thanks for a great plugin,

Kind regards

John


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In reply to John Breen

Re: Custom certificate - recurring certificates

by John Breen -
It looks like the mdl_customcert_issues table within the MariaDB is where Moodle stores the certificates attached to each user. If I were to clear down this table, i.e. empty it, would the certificate plugin then just look at the last completed attempt on the activity for the source of its certificate data? This has been the case when we have deleted certificates manually, individually up until now
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In reply to John Breen

Re: Custom certificate - recurring certificates

by Mark Nelson -
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The certificate is dynamically generated each time it is downloaded. So, if a student's grade for an item was to update for some reason and that grade item was being shown on the certificate then the grade would change. The same applies to dates. What value are you selecting for dates? There is always the option to always show the current time. Your assessment of the customcert_issues table is correct. If you delete the data here then it will mark the user as not having a certificate and will reissue them a new one. However, as I said before the data is generated dynamically so it may be an issue with how you have configured the date element.
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In reply to Mark Nelson

Re: Custom certificate - recurring certificates

by John Breen -
Hi Mark

Thanks for replying so quickly. The date we are using is the date the SCORM activity is completed and the grade is the grade passed from the SCORM activity. The course setup in Moodle is minimal. Each course consists of two sections, one to run the SCORM activity and another to print the certificate.

I see your point about picking the current system date as the date to print on the certificate, but this could cause problems for us in that we take the user attempts data out of Moodle and populate our HR system's training history for employees with the Moodle data. This could, if we use the system date, rather than the date the activity is completed, cause confusion if during our internal training audit processes, a discrepancy is found between the traininging history and the certificate dates.

This leaves us with little option but to use the SCORM activity completion date in the certificate

What do you think ?
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In reply to John Breen

Re: Custom certificate - recurring certificates

by Mark Whitington -
Hi John,
Not sure if you have seen the Recompletion plugin.
It resets a course based on a cyclical time or can allow manual resets.
The plugin targets scorm, quiz and assignment in particular.
https://moodle.org/plugins/local_recompletion
We have found it quite useful as it reissues a certificate with a fresh date when the course ie recompleted.
Average of ratings: Useful (1)