Blockchain for Academics: The Key to a More Secure and Efficient Supply Chain in Higher Education

Introduction

Blockchain technology has emerged as a transformative innovation with the potential to revolutionize various industries, including supply chain management. At its core, blockchain is a decentralized and distributed digital ledger that records transactions in a secure and transparent manner (Tapscott & Tapscott 2016; Mihalcea & Ceaușu 2017; Iansiti, & Lakhani 2017; Swan 2015). This technology offers a new paradigm for tracking and verifying the movement of goods, information, and assets across complex networks. In traditional supply chain systems, challenges such as opacity, inefficiencies, fraud, and lack of trust among participants have been persistent (Ghouri et al., 2023; Calvera Isabal et al., 2023; Flores-Vivar & García-Peñalvo, 2023; Shaoliu & Tongbai, 2023; Mihalcea, R., & Ceaușu, 2017; Khan et al., 2017; Haq, Khan, Parkash & Jabeen, 2016). However, blockchain's decentralized architecture addresses these challenges by enabling a secure, tamper-proof, and transparent record-keeping system (Zhang, 2019; McKibbin, S. 2017). Transactions, once recorded on the blockchain, cannot be altered or deleted without consensus from the network participants. This ensures data integrity and builds trust among stakeholders. As a result, blockchain has gained significant attention for its potential to enhance transparency, traceability, and overall efficiency within supply chains (McKibbin, 2017; Sheehan, 2017; Iyer, & Kemp, 2019). The previous study provides a comprehensive foundation for understanding how blockchain technology is influencing supply chain management. They emphasize the potential of blockchain to enhance transparency, traceability, and efficiency within supply chains while addressing traditional challenges.

Education revolution has increased the mobility of students as well as teachers across the world. With this educational proliferation, the Universities in developing countries face challenges associated with the issuance of certificates, attestations, and the assessment of academic performance. The problem of forgery and fraud in academic records questions the credibility of university graduates’ certificates and reduces their chances of studying or working abroad. Besides, the process of verification and accreditation of documents is time-consuming as well as costly for students and university. The need of the hour is cutting-edge solutions so as to improve the handling of academic records, issuance of certificates, safe and secure exchange and with no scope to tamper and forge the documents.

Fake degrees, credential fraud, delayed verification of credentials and lack of digital credential have been prevalent, leading to credibility issues for educational institutions and employers (David, L., & Courtois, 2018; Demir, I., & Karabatak, 2019), Galvez, 2020). Transferring academic transcripts between institutions can be slow and cumbersome, often requiring manual processes and administrative effort (Kumar, A., & Yadav, (2019). Student data, including personal and academic information, is vulnerable to breaches and misuse (Brown, Chui et al.(2011). Instances of unverified MOOC completion certificates have been in the recent past (Dillahunt et al. (2020). Also, it has been a matter to ponder wherein students have multiple digital identities across different platforms (Liu, Wang, & Zhu, (2019). Besides, issues like plagiarism, data manipulation and lack of transparency is prevalent in academics (Moxham, & Boon, (2019).

Figure 1 depicts the overall flow of the chapter process from beginning to end. The rest of this chapter is structured as follows. Section II introduces the concept of blockchain. Section III explains the preceding research. Section IV discusses the approach, Section V discusses the analysis and results, and Section VI closes with a discussion, limits, future research directions, and conclusion.

Figure 1.

Outline of research process