<![CDATA[An academic transcript is an official document – issued by an educational institution – that contains a detailed record of a student’s academic performance throughout the academic period of the student in the institution. By and large, a candidate cannot be admitted into a tertiary institution or offered an employment by a business sector without the use of a transcript to assess the candidate. A lot of bottlenecks are however encountered in sending transcripts across to the institutions that demand them for assessment of candidates. These problems are, (i) administrative delays in processing transcripts, (ii) delays in sending transcripts through courier services, (iii) typo errors in preparing the transcripts manually, (iv) the authenticity of some transcripts can be questionable. All these problems and more hinder the effective use of transcripts in screening candidates for various courses of study in a university or in an employment sector. This work developed a web service framework that can be effectively used for processing and transmitting academic transcripts across various institutions without any hindrance. The architecture of a web service was used by the researchers for developing the web service framework. A web service framework was developed for transmitting academic transcripts as XML documents across various institutions. The XML document – which uses a universally acceptable text-based notation for describing all kinds of data – is the game changer for the effective transmission of academic transcripts across different computer systems and software applications of various institutions. Conclusion: A web service is an application-to-application (A2A) based protocol that enables the server to return XML-based results securely to a client application and not to a web browser that can be prone to hackers. These features facilitate the processing and transmission of academic transcripts across various institutions seamlessly and securely. This work developed a web service framework that can be effectively used by tertiary institutions for processing transcripts and also sending copies of them in real-time to other institutions that demand them for official uses. The developed web service framework would be highly invaluable for tertiary institutions and business sectors for screening candidates effectively for admissions or employment purposes, respectively.]]>
