Over a hundred Universities and Colleges granting digital diplomas, and advancing digital governance.

More and more corporate human resource departments upload diploma PDFs to the Ministry of Education’s (MOE) Digital Diploma Verification System to verify newcomers’ educational backgrounds. After a short delay, “Verification Successful” appears on the screen, completing the verification process. Compared to the older methods of emailing the universities and colleges for verification, or notarization by a notary, this new method is more convenient and authoritative. Behind this seemingly simple document and short procedure are hash functions and secure encryption layers for verification, signaling a new milestone in Taiwan’s higher education digital verification of diplomas towards the goal of digitization of degree certification.

Associate Professor Kun-Ta Chuang of the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Cheng Kung University (NCKU), led the team that researched and developed this procedure. He says, “The key to a successful diploma verification system is how to make the issuing and certifying systems foolproof and convince people that the diploma is real.”

Strict Information Security to Build System Credibility

In 2019, with the support of the MOE, the National Digital Certificate and Environment Implementation Pilot Program was born, with Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) expert Professor Chuang as principal investigator, and then-director of the Center for Teaching and Learning Development Dr. Yu Chen Shu as co-principal investigator. The program invited national and private universities of technology and comprehensive universities to participate by providing IT engineer and administrator feedback, thereby working together on development and adjustment.

“We started developing the issuing and certifying systems from scratch, and the participating schools all differed in terms of information systems, equipment setup, and management. Some staffed the relevant positions themselves and could be engaged directly; others contracted with external providers that we had to deal with,” says Professor Chuang. As each school’s systems were different, the initial effort was to find general issues while also clarifying the issues that each school might face, so that the functions could be strengthened from building and issuing certification systems to connecting certifying systems in the future. “Especially servers in the MOE, since they are essential to public confidence in the verification system, their information security was everyone’s main concern.”

After five trial stages, the number of participating schools expanded from 4 to over 100, with over 70 having fully implemented systems. The fifth stage will focus on vocational and technological colleges and universities. The MOE is very strict about information security management. Since the information security level of most schools is only at Level C, out of an overabundance of caution, the development team advises that the issuing system be run independently and sends the source code to participating schools for them to scan for weaknesses. As soon as a weakness is found, they assist with system updates. Professor Chuang says of the development team’s efforts in maintaining information security: “The most common issues we faced actually had to do with the system, so we’re always very careful when doing updates. The MOE also uses third-party verification to ensure system security. On days more susceptible to hacker attacks, we make sure to have team members on call to ensure the website isn’t replaced or attacked.”

Seed Schools Help Horizontal Promulgation

From this close cooperation with participating schools, the development team found that the system needed to be customized in order to suit every school. “We originally thought that diplomas were the product of a student’s final semester after confirming their graduation qualifications. But we discovered that many schools have other procedures, such as a pre-made official document number at the start of senior year that is destroyed if the student can’t graduate on time. Every school has a different process, system, and way of manufacturing,” says Professor Chuang. Some schools ask students to pick up their diplomas individually after completing the commencement process, while others ask class representatives to pick up all the diplomas of the class and hand them out all at once. “These details had to be confirmed with the schools, because our system was designed to be integrated with the commencement process. If the process couldn’t be changed, we had to change our system design.”

Based on this early development experience, the MOE and NCKU decided to invite schools with relatively sufficient Computer and Network Centers and capacities to become seed schools, helping other schools implement issuing systems and conducting horizontal promotion. When schools run into problems, including how to navigate firewalls or when administrative staff are unfamiliar with the system and cannot connect to the MOE’s verification system, seed schools can help resolve them immediately. At the same time, to reduce obstacles to participation due to a digital divide between schools, NCKU created an installation package with detailed contingency plans for various possible issues when sending data back to the MOE or creating digital diplomas.

One Challenge After Another

Even so, for many schools, the office responsible for system development (Computer and Network Center, or Office of Library and Information Service) and the office that actually uses the system (the Office of Academic Affairs; OAA) often experienced a disparity in the speed of receiving information, leading to communication difficulties. Professor Chuang concedes that cross-departmental intramural communication is one aspect that is hard for development or seed teams to help with. “It’s sometimes hard to talk to one another with the languages of two different specializations. Some OAA staff reported that they couldn’t understand what their IT colleagues were trying to explain. We would then advise them to seek out OAA staff in schools that have successfully installed the system, encountered similar situations, and are nevertheless able to use the system smoothly.”

But once they entered the testing phase, the development team could not avoid encountering some problems. For example, to reduce the load on the MOE’s servers and bandwidth, the original system design limited the file size of each digital diploma uploaded by a school to 1.5MB. However, the system’s foolproof mechanism was imperfect, and some schools were able to issue diplomas larger than 1.5MB. When these diplomas were uploaded to the MOE’s verification system, the verification failed. “This is a very serious issue, because valid certificates that have been issued cannot be reissued or retracted. Ultimately, we tried loosening the file size restriction and stress tested the MOE’s servers. We found that during graduation season, when companies have a high demand for verification, the system could handle file sizes up to 2MB, so we loosened the digital diploma file size restriction from 1.5MB to 2MB.”

From Digital Diplomas to Digital Governance

In our current society, more people are accepting of paper diplomas than digital ones, so whether digital diplomas can completely replace paper diplomas is still an open question. “We aren’t planning on replacing paper diplomas but rather aiming to make digital diplomas an equivalent copy to paper diplomas, so that digital diplomas and paper diplomas present identical information.” Professor Chuang mentioned that the biggest challenges for paper diplomas were preservation and circulation. Once you lose it, you must apply to replace it. This not only creates a burden for schools’ administrative staff, some schools require application in person, which is very inconvenient for those who live far away or even abroad. This is a circulation problem. “But a digital diploma file can be saved anywhere and, when needed, be emailed to corporations, schools, or organizations for them to upload and verify for themselves.”

In the past, degree verification could only be carried out during matriculation or onboarding, but with a digital diploma, it can be carried out ahead of time during the process of applying for employment or to a graduate program, thereby lowering the chances of applications with fake degrees. Professor Chuang says, “This is the value of digital governance, and the most basic function of digital diplomas in terms of circulation.” From this, we can see that digital diplomas are only the beginning. Using the verification system created by the MOE, many schools hope to include more types of digital documents, opening up the possibility of digital governance.

In some trial stages, many schools repeatedly offered feedback to the MOE and the development team regarding the possibility of digitizing transcripts and instructor certificates. NCKU, too, used the MOE’s verification system infrastructure to issue verifiable digital transcripts and instructor certificates, but this is still a far cry from true digital governance. Professor Chuang explains the basic idea of digital governance as follows: “Using bidirectional accounts and passwords, we could know who logged on to look at these digital documents, and how many times. We could analyze the sector distribution of corporations that use the system to verify documents and provide this information to schools. We could track the trajectories of alumni and alumnae.”

Thus, as more and more schools participate in the MOE’s National Digital Certificate and Environment Implementation Pilot Program, the digital diplomas will enjoy increasing circulation. In addition to completing the enterprise’s Application Programming Interface and personal application to reissue diplomas to expand and perfect the system, the development team will also invite students to authorize participation in data governance, conduct an experiment in digital governance, and transform a plain text PDF into machine-readable metadata through encryption and user authorization. In the future, they could form alliances to implement relevant mechanisms to use this information for administrative research, and even to open up the verification system for college admissions and recommendations, or for students of related exams to upload their own digital documents, thus helping to resolve administrative staff shortages.