Leveraging blockchain in the certification process in the higher education sector

The educational system in Saudi Arabia has improved enormously by many means, including the adoption of new education programmes and research and development initiatives. Recently, the higher education sector in Saudi Arabia has emerged as one of the fields in which investments in blockchain-based systems and services are desirable. Distributed ledger technologies, such as blockchain technology have recently gained prominence as it is considered a technological revolution. Yet, with all these facts, there are a variety of issues and important changes occurring in Saudi higher education, in terms of its capacity, research impacts, international links and graduate outcomes. Accordingly, the research selected the education sector that has emerged as one of the fields in which investments in blockchainbased systems and services are desirable, specifically in developing countries. This research aims to leverage blockchain-based technology in higher education systems in Saudi Arabia, particularly the ‘certification process’, which is the process of generating and verifying learners’ certificates. The focus of this research is on investigating secure, acceptable blockchain-based certification systems that certainly increase awareness about the huge importance of this revolution. This includes the influential factors for users accepting the system and proposing a Decentralized Application for Smart Certificate (DASC). The users’ acceptance of this idea and system is examined using a proposed novel conceptual model indicating the main influential factors affecting user acceptance. To develop the conceptual model, the author first reviewed the extant and commonly used theories in analysing the acceptance usage of technologies along with the nature of blockchain component-related literature to identify the main factors surrounding blockchain technology adoption. This research consists of two main studies. The first study investigated the target user’s acceptance of the adoption of blockchain in the certification process of the higher education sector. The second study is an experimental study to test the proposed smart certificate system’s prototype (DASC) by collecting target users’ feedback. This research focused on blockchain as an innovation that offers a new paradigm for data integrity, reliability, and authenticity in the certification process in higher education sector. This research supports the Saudi Arabian vision that seeks to build an education system that satisfies market needs and provides sustainable technological opportunities for educational systems. Thus, this thesis proposes an architectural design for validating and sharing a certification system that will guarantee the authenticity of shared higher education certificates by providing high privacy and security aspects in a blockchain network. The contributions of this research will enhance the idea of deploying blockchain in the higher education sector in developing countries, which is expected to be beneficial as it solves some existing issues with the certification process. This research has made several key contributions, including a novel conceptual model to identify the key factors that affect the user’s acceptance of adopting blockchain in the certification process. Consequently, in terms of the theoretical implications, this research emphasises the significance of such hypothesized relationships when performing empirical research in the blockchain technology context.