Help Needed: Automating Certificates and Restricting Course Access After Completion

[GenApophis]

Hello everyone,

I'm using Chamilo 1.11.28. I need some help with the following points related to Chamilo:

Automating Certificate Issuance:
I would like users to automatically receive a certificate after they complete a learning path and finish an exercise. How can I set this up?

Restricting Course Re-Access After Certification:
I want to ensure that users cannot retake a course or an exam after they have received a certificate for that specific course. How can I implement this functionality?

Any guidance, tips, or best practices would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you in advance for your help!

[ywarnier]

Hi @GenApophis

To setup automatic certificate issuance within a learning path, you need to:

• create a learning path
• use the "Certificate" item (the F1-race finish flag), which will always place itself as the last step of your learning path and require you to finish all items of the learning path to see it
• then you need to setup the learning path as the only linked item in the gradebook/assessments tool (where you also configure the certificate) with a weight of 100
• make sure you click the settings (pencil) icon in the assessments tool to mark the box "Generate certificate" (the other options can usually be left "as is")
• return to your learning path and, edit the "Certificate" page to make sure the message includes ((certificate)). This is a dynamic link to the certificate tool, so if the learner reaches this page and the certificate has been configured correctly in the assessments tool, the user will now get a button here to collect their certificate

This generates the certificate independent of whether they click the button or download it or not.

It should look something like that (I'm giving you the unstyled version):

[ywarnier]

About restricting course re-access after the certificate is generated: Course access is determined by the main/inc/local.inc.php file. There are several blocks that each match a specific, and sometimes complex, access method, and then around line ~1085 and up to line ~1835, you will find another series of blocks that check $_cid (course id) and $session_id.

If you want to remove access as soon as they have generated their certificate, you would have to do something in the main/lp/lp_final_item.php script to ensure that you force a redirect (I wouldn't do that if I were you, because then there's an issue of whether they have actually been able to download their certificate or not), but if you want to cut them some slack and allow them to continue in the course until their next logout/login, then you can modifiy local.inc.php to include a check on the gradebook_certificate table (there are many Gradebook methods in main/gradebook/lib/be/category.class.php, one of which is Gradebook::is_certificate_available($user_id) which probably is what you're looking for).

If you see the user already has a certificate, you could use the default api_not_allowed(true); to show them a red message saying they don't have access, or use any other method to kick them out of there.

If you look a bit further, you might want to additionally remove the course from their courses list, but this brings the issue of where you do that check, because if you do that in the main function that lists the courses and sessions to which the user has access, you might also remove the ability for that user to ever see his/her certificate again on the platform... I'll leave that part as an exercise to you 😉

[ywarnier]

Duplicate of #6050