Blockchain-Based Applications in Education: A Systematic Review

Abstract

Recently, blockchain technology has gained considerable attention from researchers and practitioners. This is mainly due to its unique features including decentralization, security, reliability, and data integrity. Despite this growing interest, little is known about the current state of knowledge and practice regarding the use of blockchain technology in education. This article is a systematic review of research investigating blockchain-based educational applications. It focuses on three main themes: (1) educational applications that have been developed with blockchain technology, (2) benefits that blockchain technology could bring to education, and (3) challenges of adopting blockchain technology in education. A detailed results analysis of each theme was conducted as well as an intensive discussion based on the findings. This review also offers insight into other educational areas that could benefit from blockchain technology.

Towards Next Generation Teaching, Learning, and Context-Aware Applications for Higher Education: A Review on Blockchain, IoT, Fog and Edge Computing Enabled Smart Campuses and Universities

“…Both academia [11][12][13] and public entities like the European Commission [46] have recently considered the improvement of the architectures described in the previous section by using Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) like blockchain. Such a technology can be used for implementing higher education and smart campus applications, due to their ability to provide data exchanges among entities that do not necessarily trust each other [47].…”

“…Specifically, blockchain has been suggested for guaranteeing education certificate authenticity [57,58], managing digital copyright information [59], verifying learning outcomes [60,61], or enhancing e-learning interaction [62]. More potential smart campus applications and a deeper analysis on their characteristics can be found in [11][12][13]46].…”

“…In contrast to previous reviews and surveys on smart campuses/universities, which are presented as systematic literature reviews [8,9], are focused on defining certain generic concepts/applications [10], or are centered on specific technologies [11][12][13][14][15][16], this article provides a holistic review that analyzes the application of the latest key technologies and architectures for the development of smart campuses and universities, including the following contributions, which have not been found together in the previous literature.…”

UniChain: A Design of Blockchain-Based System for Electronic Academic Records Access and Permissions Management

“…As universities currently maintain and manage the EARs, while students can only read data, provider nodes in the proposed design will be responsible for the maintenance of the blockchain. According to an article that was published in the Applied Sciences Journal in June 2019 [30], a blockchain could bring several benefits to education: (1) improving security that includes data protection, privacy, and integrity; (2) providing better control on how students' data are accessed and by whom; (3) enhancing accountability and transparency; (4) enhancing trust between all included parties and ease the communication between them; (5) lowering the cost as the nature of blockchain technology can help in reducing the unnecessary cost associated with the transactions and storage of data; (6) authenticating students' identities as well as their digital certificates; (7) the efficiency of data exchange and the management of students records; (8) enhancing interoperability; and (10) supporting future career.…”

Opinions on Sustainability of Smart Cities in the Context of Energy Challenges Posed by Cryptocurrency Mining

“…Authors [11] specifically evaluated blockchain relevance to biomedical research, [17] explained that it could find application in ICT, especially in Internet of Things [18] where it has been predicted to bring about magnificent changes in the way business is done, and in cloud computing [19]. In the area of education, [20] explained that a number of blockchain-based educational softwares are already making waves in the market nowadays. In the aspect of storage of intellectual properties, blockchain has also been found to be relevant [21].…”