Design and Implementation of Certificate Verification System
Chapter One
OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY
The main objective of this study to design and implement certificate verification system which verifies a certificate against the certificates produced by the school. This method will phase out outdated paper/manual method, though the papers will still be kept safe in schools for future reference.
Other objectives include:
- To make Certificate accessibility Easy
- To save time and Resources
- To prevent risk in transits in result verification, etc.
CHAPTER TWO
LITERATURE REVIEW
Academic affair is usually in charge of student result and up to date of the honors awarded to each student. It has a collection of sources, resources, and services, and the structure in which it is housed. There can be no doubt that much of the certificates in this area speculates on the future role of safe means (mini-library) – none of which is particularly clear.
Since (1995), or what Tenopir calls the “post web world” (2003), libraries have been seen as in danger of “substitution” The web is becoming “a ubiquitous source of information” giving an “illusion of depth and comprehensiveness” that leads to a questioning of the value of libraries and their collections. This review will not speculate on these future roles but will focus instead on the certainty of changing technology, increasingly digital information resources and societal shifts that have changed user expectations of online certificate verification system.
Digital libraries are situated in unique environments, thus environmental factors have also been examined for their impact on users’ awareness, acceptance and use habits often the social contexts or domains surrounding an online certificate verification system are very different, for instance, varies from institution to institution. Adams and Blandford (2004) demonstrate why it is important within academic contexts to market a digital library as a learning resource, but to show users within a clinical domain (e.g., a health care setting) how a digital library system can support evidence-based medicine with information that is “paramount” to decision making. In this thesis, we present the core elements of the manifesto and introduce central aspects of the digital library framework.
Existing system
Certificate verification method that is prevalent today is a manual process, in this process the institution/organization that want to verify a result will have to trip to the university or send a written request so as to verify result. The request will then go to academic affair which refer to the library or safe files to look for the duplicate certificate, this can really be time consuming, also sometimes files are lost when moved from one office to another, and in some cases, can be missing or be difficult to locate.
This model is most often used in the following scenarios:
- Requirements of the complete system are clearly defined and understood.
- Major requirements must be defined; however, some functionalities or requested enhancements may evolve with time.
- There is a time to the market constraint.
- A new technology is being used and is being learnt by the development team while working on the paper.
- Resources with needed skill set are not available and are planned to be used on contract basis for specific iterations.
- There are some high risk features and goals which may change in the future.
CHAPTER THREE
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
Introduction
This chapter shows how the research methods used is carrying out our research in line with the research questions. The aim is find out the appropriate design for verification, and establish what methods employers, recruiters and organizations use during verification of certificates. The information obtained from the interview was used to influence in the development of the prototype for certificate verification. After interacting with the system and seeing how fast and easy it is to verify certificates most of user were willing and desiring to have such a system implemented. The core of the study was aimed at gathering information from relevant institutions that that need to screen certificates.
Target Population
Target population is asset of elements that researcher focuses on (Orodho and Okombo), 2002). The target population for this study was learning institution, organization, and recruiting agencies in the entire country. The data was collected in Nairobi region for the purposes of ease access and cost of the researcher. This formed a representative sample for the entire country. We used a stratified random sampling technique in selecting respondents from the population.
Sampling Design
A sample is part of large population (Orodho 2009).Sampling is a process of selecting a sub-set of cases in order to draw conclusions about the entire sets(Okombo and Tromp,2006).During the research, the study adopted was the stratified sampling technique since it was targeting specific groups of respondents. According to C.R Kothari, 2004, if a population from which a sample is to be drawn does not constitute a homogeneous group, stratified sampling technique is generally applied in order to obtain a representative sample.
CHAPTER FOUR
ANALYSIS, DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION
ANALYSIS
The analysis involves gathering considerable amount of information. System analyst obtains information from people who will use the system, either by interviewing them or by watching they work.
Functional Requirements
These are the specific statements that prototype should provide and how it should react to particular inputs.
The users
Users shall be able to login
Users shall be able to sign up, create their account, login with their own username, request verification and receive the feedback.
Administrator
Administrator shall be able to login and manage the user’s account and their privileges
Institutions
The system shall be able to login, register Institution, manage their institutions, add students, and upload the student’s certificates and photos. The system shall allow institution to make request for verification and get reply.
CHAPTER FIVE
CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS
Introduction
This research work is an effort towards elimination of fake certificates in learning institutions. As discussed in the introduction chapter of this study, verification of academic certificates is one of the important research areas today. This work contributes towards solving problems in academic fraud. A part of this work focused on the application of the proposed prototype as proof of concept. In our proof of concept, the prototype was able to verify the student’s academic details as they are in the database which was uploaded by the learning institutions.
Achievements
The following were achieved as per the objectives set in chapter one
Objective 1
Research on the use of online computing platforms and models
Research of related work on online computing was achieved. Several online computing models were discussed in literature review.
Objective 2
Develop a prototype for certificates verification and hosting on online environment.
The prototype was developed using the Code igniter PHP framework and hosted in online computing environment. Field test was done at various institutions, University of Nairobi, Technical University of Kenya, and School Of signal, National Military Communication Centre and Recruiting agencies.
- We implemented a Vericert prototype as proof of concept. The implemented VeriCert prototype targeted the recruiters, employers as the primary users.
- Advances can be made to adopt online computing to provide verifications as a service.
Finding
According to the evaluation and test carried out it was concluded that this study has shown that verification of academic certification is necessary.
Various institutions of higher learning, organizations were identified. The results suggested that the prototype was helpful in verification of academic certificates. It showed that organizations attitude and perceived usefulness both directly drive the usage intention.
The finding highlighted that institutions, organizations and recruiting agencies have the ability and willing to use this technology.
Challenges and limitations
Installation of datacenter in a online computing environment is quite expensive.
Online computing is still a new technology which is not fully adopted in Kenyan market.
Data collection method
The main challenge was unwillingness of the user to provide information of how they verify their certificates. It was considered as very sensitive and confidential data. After talking at length with the users some agreed and others refused completely.
Recommendation
Based on experience during the research, we would like to recommend that more research be done in online computing and a lot of literature review done for related work.
After successfully implementing and testing the project prototype, in order to realize the intended purpose of the study we recommend the prototype to be adopted by:-
- Online computing providers
- Higher learning institutions
- Organizations and recruiting agencies
Future Work
To enhance this system and to increase the usability of the overall solution in learning institutions and organization the needs certificate verification the following items may be considered for future implementation;
First and foremost as part of continuation for this project, lots of future work is ahead for the full implementation and deployment online computing environment as Software as a Service; hence inclusion in the online computing would add more value to the research.
Secondly, development for a wider scope should be incorporated into the whole project to ensure that the solution is all rounded.
Lastly the solution should be tailored and security mechanism implemented well so that it will build more trust to the targeted market/users. Security measured to be included are as follows:
- Public key to be issued to the users of the system
- Authentication of all devices that will be used to connect to the online databases
- Institutions to be verified before they use the system by certification authority.
- All the email used to be verified
- All the device connecting to the online must first registered and then authenticated.
- All the academic certificates to have sealed verification code which when scanned will provide link to the academic database.
- Authenticate the IP address to ascertain that they are tied up with the institutions hosting the academic database.
Conclusion
From my research, I can clearly state that online computing technology and its’ application has been taken with a lot of seriousness globally and I have no doubt that my research has as well contributed positively towards the uptake of this novel technology. It’s my hope that when the whole system is developed and implemented the problems of having fake certificate will be greatly reduced.
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