Despite being the most popular way to prove skills and knowledge in most industries, traditional paper certificates have never been a good fit for online learning. In fact, with digital credentials on the rise, they are now becoming obsolete. Paper certificates are expensive to produce and ship; difficult to keep safe from loss or damage; not verifiable or portable; and as an offline document, they’re not connected with any data or personal information (like a LinkedIn profile) that would make them useful to employers or learners. Therefore, smart certificates and digital badges are getting popular among people.
What are Smart Certificates and Open Badges?
Smart certificates and digital badges are fast becoming the gold standard for verifying qualifications, training, skills, and competencies.
Smart certificates and open badges are a new generation of technology-enabled credentials that provide proof of an individual’s professional achievements and qualifications. They include key elements such as:
- Date of issue, including the exact time when the certificate was issued
- Details on the course, including a description and what was learned from it
- The name of the institution or organization issuing the certificate
- The name of the person being certified
- Institution’s logo or personalized seal
- A precise URL where each certificate can be verified online to prove its authenticity
- A unique serial number for each smart certificate
What is a Smart Certificate?
Smart certificates provide a different view on education and certification. With smart certificates you can empower yourself, your students or your employees. They make education and certification simple, clear and credible for everyone.
Smart certificates are paperless documents that are uniquely verifiable and tamper-proof because they’re hosted on the blockchain. They represent real world achievements, whether in education or the workforce. Smart certificates are digital native; they live online and are accessible anywhere in the world to anyone with an internet connection. This makes them ideal for today’s global workplace, where degrees, diplomas, certifications, and licenses need to be portable, verifiable and trustworthy across borders and time zones.
How Smart Certificates Work
Smart Certificates are a way to guarantee that a certificate is authentic, issued by an official authority and valid. They can also be used to update and maintain certificates over time, to ensure that they remain valid.
Smart certificates include an encrypted block of data to verify each certificate’s authenticity. This means that if anyone tries to alter or duplicate a smart certificate, their efforts will be detected.
Smart certificates work by combining blockchain technology with open badges — digital representations of achievements. The blockchain provides a permanent record of each smart certificate that never changes. The badge displays information about the certificate on an online profile that can be viewed by anyone with an internet connection.
What Is an Open Badge?
An Open Badge is a digital representation of a skill you’ve earned, linked to evidence that verifies your achievement. Badge earners can tell the story of their learning journey by detailing how they learned a skill and providing evidence of it.
Badges are a simple, visual way to understand, share, and celebrate achievements. They’re a way to acknowledge any number of achievements in any number of contexts. Badges don’t have to be complicated, but they do have to be meaningful. In open badges, the achievement is linked to an assessment or a certification or some other kind of evidence that shows that you were able to do something that was worth acknowledging.
Open Badges are a way to recognise the skills, achievements and qualifications of individuals. Open Badges are open-source badges that are issued by an organisation or individual. They can be embedded with additional metadata, which makes them verifiable, portable, and shareable.
What’s The Value For You?
Let’s face it. CVs are a thing of the past. They are impersonal, 2-dimensional, and rarely tell the full story of a person’s skills and accomplishments.
In this new digital world of work, employers need more than just a CV to find the right hires. They also need to know how skilled potential candidates are and whether they have the potential to grow in their roles.
Smart certificates and open badges are electronic representations of knowledge, skills or achievements. Like their physical counterparts, they allow an individual to prove competence in a particular skill.
Badges and certificates also play a crucial role in helping learners connect with job opportunities through their networks. This is because when learners earn an Open Badge from an organization, they earn much more than just a digital credential. They also get access to information about how they learned that skill, what they were able to accomplish as part of their learning journey and what evidence they provided to prove that they have indeed acquired that skill.
The open badge standard allows you to easily share your credentials with a greater audience. You can share via email, add them to social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn or display them on your website which is perfect if you’re a freelancer.
Advantages of Smart Certificates & Badges over Traditional Certificates
When you apply for a job, you need to show your academic certificates to prove your education degree and you need to show other certificates from a webinar or training program to prove your knowledge, skills, and competencies. However, even if you have done a lot of online courses, educations, trainings and so on, you may not have any certificate to prove them.
Or, if you have conducted some webinars or training sessions on the internet as a teacher/trainer and want to give certificates to the participants, how will you do that?
Yes, we all are familiar with traditional paper certificates. They are issued by companies, institutes and even by individuals. But these certificates do not carry much information, they do not prove much and can be easily faked too.
But what if we can make these paper certificates more flexible, convenient, and useful for everyone like students, job seekers, teachers, and companies? Smart certificates are different from traditional certificates in the way they are digital, open, and verifiable anytime anywhere. They carry more information than traditional certificates and prove knowledge, skills, competencies, and achievements.
Smart certificates and digital badges offer a wide range of benefits over traditional certificates and paper-based badges:
- Easy to issue and send your recipients automatically
- Can be verified by anyone in the world just by scanning the certificate or badge with their smartphone
- Offer interactive elements that can include videos, images, links, social media buttons and more
- Can be customized with your own design using our smart certificate & badge creator tool
- Can be sent to multiple recipients at once
- No limit on the number of certificates you can issue or store
- Enables you to save time and money over paper-based alternatives
- They are secured and can’t be copied
- They are shareable on CV’s, websites, social media and so on
- They have no limits, it can be issued by any by companies, educational institutions and even individuals who want to recognize someone’s skills or work in an official capacity.
Why Issue Smart Certificates/Badges?
Smart certificates/badges are digital credentials that students earn when they complete online courses or in-person training. They can be issued by any organization – schools, universities, companies, non-profits. The unique part is that smart certificates are embedded with a level of trust as they are cryptographically verifiable and can also be verified by issuing institutions in real-time.
While the concept of digital credentials is relatively new, the demand for them has been growing steadily as more and more organizations are realizing that they can help boost their bottom line. The biggest benefit is that smart certificates help students, employees, and organizations in a variety of ways.
- Benefits for certificate/badge earners
Smart certificates/open badges can include many different types of information about the learner’s achievement (e.g., grade earned, date of completion) and about the course itself (e.g., title, description). This information is embedded directly into the digital certificate itself.
Smart certificates provide a rich source of data about learner’s education history such as when they earned it, where they earned it from and what they learned. With this information, job applicants can better understand their own skillset as well as explain to potential employers how they became qualified for a particular role.
Open badges are like smart certificates: they certify academic achievement, skills, and learning, but they also showcase course content, whether that’s a syllabus, portfolio, report, or other evidence of learning. Smart certificates and open badges can also be presented on social media or in job applications with the click of a button.
- Benefits for teachers, trainers, and academics
For teachers and trainers, smart certificates are a new way to certify academic achievements, skills, and learning progress of their students. This method is faster, cheaper, and more transparent than traditional methods.
Also it’s important to know that students get a better understanding of what they need to do to earn a certificate. They also know that the certificate they receive at the end of the course can be used to improve their chances of landing jobs or advancing their careers.
- Benefits for recruiters and companies
Smart Certificates and open badges are the new way to certify skills, achievements, learning and talent. They are essential for recruiters and employers, for educational institutions and corporations.
A digital certificate is a document issued by an institution, which certifies the identity or a characteristic of an individual. It can be used to verify the authenticity of a certificate and help to ensure that the recipient is who they claim to be.
The main feature of smart certificates is that they can be verified online in real-time by anyone. This means that potential employers can easily check whether a candidate is telling the truth about their educational background and achievements. Employers get a better idea of who they are hiring and whether or not they are qualified for the position.
Smart certificates are also a more convenient option as they can be instantly verified online, by employers and recruiters. This helps to legitimize the validity of the certificate before undertaking any further verification activities. They can also easily be scanned into an applicant tracking system (ATS).
How Can You Issue Smart Certificates and Digital Badges?
We are living in a digital era, where everything is getting digitized, and the education sector is no different. Everything from the way we learn to the way we share the knowledge and learning is changing, and it has been a positive change so far. Traditional paper-based certificates are becoming obsolete with digital certificates taking over. The digital certificates are easy to issue, verify and display on various platforms.
The main idea behind a smart certificate is that the recipient of the certificate can prove ownership by presenting a unique URL.
– It allows you to set up an individual URL for each student/recipient
– It allows you to set up an individual badge for each student/recipient
– It allows you to show, in real time, the number of times that someone has looked at the certificate (claims)
– It gives anyone who looks at the certificate full details about how it was earned, including dates, institutions, awards and so on
– It allows anyone who looks at the certificate to see an image of your logo or brand
You are a school, a university, a company, an organization or just a freelancer providing educational courses or other kind of training? Sertifier allows you to issue certificates that contain information about your educational programs, courses, conferences or other public events as well as information about their recipients – participants in these events.
For the recipients, the smart certificates provide all your details very clearly, which includes:
- Your name
- What you have achieved
- Institution that awarded you
- Date of award
- Proof of validity
How Sertifier Can Help?
In order to keep up with the pace of change, Sertifier was established in 2016 with a goal to make issuing and managing certificates easier. We have been constantly improving our platform since then!
Sertifier is a cloud-based platform that helps you issue smart certificates and digital badges. We provide a platform for issuing, verifying and displaying digital credentials. With Sertifier, you can easily create certificates for your students, employees or other individuals that you want to award with certificates.
Sertifier helps you award and manage smart certificates & open badges, these are a modern form of crediting online courses and can be used as a competitive advantage, so that candidates can stand out during the application process.
Issuing certificates & badges is also super easy with Sertifier’s beautifully designed templates, if you are not happy with our templates you can easily design your own template that you think fits better for your company or organization. Sertifier allows you to set custom subtexts on all certificates just like mentioning student.
What Makes Sertifier Different From Other Tools?
- Sertifier’s mission is to provide an easy way for instructors, trainers, teachers and organizations to issue digital diplomas to their students in just minutes without having any technical skills. We offer a simple interface with plenty of options so everyone can find something suitable for them!
- Sertifier is built from scratch by developers who know everything about education, we know how it feels to issue thousands of certificates manually, so we automated it for you.
- Sertifier is the only tool out there that is offering smart digital badges for educational institutions and corporates and both sides will love us! Smart Certificates are highly customizable in terms of background images and text, but what we offer is really special.
- With Sertifier you will never have to worry about security, because all issued certificates are secured with blockchain technology which ensures their authenticity and prevents them from being tampered with.
- Using Sertifier can also help you build an audience by providing an easy way to share your certificates on social media sites like Facebook and LinkedIn. You can also use smart certificates to identify your students on your website or wherever you want to use them.
- Smart certificates and open badges issued by Sertifier will be valid forever! You don’t have to be our user as an issuer organization for your certificates/badges to be valid.
- Sertifier offers several purchasing plans that offers different features.
Our values are:
- Simple sign-up process, so you don’t need to fill out forms for hours to get started.
- Clean and simple interface, so you can focus more on content and less on design.
- Effortless certificate design, so you can create your own template or pick from our templates
- Customization of details, so you can set custom subtexts and logos on all certificates.
Can I use Sertifier for free? Are there any limitations?
Yes! You can sign up now and start your 7-days free trial which enables you to use all of Sertifier’s premium+ features. After your trial ends, you will be able to create smart certificates & digital badges for free for up to 20 recipients, but they will be watermarked with “Issued by Sertifier” text. You can start using Sertifier for free and upgrade when you need it.
Smart certificates and digital badges are two ways to give recognition to your employees, colleagues or clients. People are increasingly looking for ways to distinguish themselves in a competitive job market, and smart certificates and digital badges can be an effective way of doing just that.
That’s where Sertifier comes in. Our platform simplifies the work of creating, managing and distributing digital certificates. We make it easy for you to create your own digital badge templates and award them to employees, students or whomever else you want.
