Revolutionising higher education by adopting blockchain technology in the certification process

Distributed ledger technologies such as blockchain have recently gained prominence as one of the latest technological revolutions. Therefore, many studies are currently exploring blockchain adoption in various fields, including the higher education sector. Recently, the education sector has emerged as one of the fields in which investments for blockchain-based systems and services are desirable. However, the extant literature lacks a guiding framework for the integration of blockchain and other relevant technologies in the use of certificating systems that issue authentic and sharable student credentials. Existing credentialing systems use analogue operations to manage certificate generation. These systems are slow and unreliable and, in some cases, may raise other cultural and social issues depending on the context of the education system. Consequently, this paper presents an analysis of blockchain adoption in this field, specifically with regard to the process of generating and sharing higher education student certificates. The paper outlines the first phase of an ongoing research project by proposing a validating and sharing framework for certificates that will guarantee the authenticity of shared higher education certificates by providing high privacy and security aspects in a blockchain network. It includes the design of a blockchain-based certificating system architecture to address issues and solutions in higher education systems. Thus, deploying blockchain in the higher education sector is expected to be beneficial as it solves some existing issues with the certification process.