Digital Transformation in Summer Training Process at King Abdulaziz University: Action Design Research in Practice

In the knowledge development of online assessment in learning management systems (LMSs), many assessments are evaluated weekly in the summer training course for undergraduate students in the Faculty of Computing and Information Technology at King Abdul-Aziz University in Saudi Arabia. The number of performance assessments in the summer training course reaches 15 weeks. Many of them, however, are sent or done informally or through unreliable ways and cannot be verified by third parties. Therefore, applying the concept of digital transformation is essential. This research study reported herein used the action design research (ADR) method to build a new information technology system that could assist in the digital transformation. An electronic platform was designed, developed, implemented, and evaluated using the ADR method so that the main people involved in the summer training process (i.e., students, academic supervisors, and administrators) would have a high level of satisfaction with it. The study was conducted on 452 students, 105 academic supervisors, and 15 administrative staff and was conducted during the summer semester of 2020. All the training processes were digitally transformed and automated to control and raise the level and reliability of the training. All involved people were satisfied, thus, shifting the process to be in a digital form assist in achieving the high-level goal.