Challenges of Using Blockchain in the Education Sector: A Literature Review

Abstract

Blockchain is one of the latest innovations that is increasingly attracting the attention of various stakeholders in different fields, including the education sector. This is primarily due to its attractive features, such as decentralization, transparency, traceability, security, and reliability. Despite its advantages, blockchain still faces several challenges, and the acceptance rate of this technology is still low. Thus, the purpose of this study was to conduct a review of published articles that have discussed the challenges of adopting blockchain in the education sector. The review contained scientific papers published from 2017 to 2022 and, from the screened records, 32 articles were analyzed in full-text form. In this review, 14 challenges were reported and classified, based on the technology-organization-environment (TOE) framework. In addition, this review showed that organizational and environmental barriers received little attention in the literature, compared to technological barriers.

Barriers Affecting Higher Education Institutions’ Adoption of Blockchain Technology: A Qualitative Study

“…reported by participants, see Figure 2. This is due to the technological innovation and immaturity of the blockchain, and the growing desire to find solutions to various technical issues to make it a secure, stable and sustainable technology [1]. The current findings of this study support previous studies and reviews that also found an increased number of studies focused on technological barriers [1].…”

“…This is due to the technological innovation and immaturity of the blockchain, and the growing desire to find solutions to various technical issues to make it a secure, stable and sustainable technology [1]. The current findings of this study support previous studies and reviews that also found an increased number of studies focused on technological barriers [1]. However, this indicates a gap regarding the organizational and environmental concerns that affect the implementation of this technology in the higher education sector.…”

“…The technological challenges are as follows: The findings of the current study showed that technological challenges received more attention from participants than the other two contexts, where nine technological challenges, three organizational challenges, and three environmental challenges were The findings of the current study showed that technological challenges received more attention from participants than the other two contexts, where nine technological challenges, three organizational challenges, and three environmental challenges were reported by participants, see Figure 2. This is due to the technological innovation and immaturity of the blockchain, and the growing desire to find solutions to various technical issues to make it a secure, stable and sustainable technology [1].…”

“…For example, a lack of scalability is not a problem for private blockchain networks [45]. However, several previous studies described a specific context and settings in which the challenges were identified such as in [12,46] while others identified challenges in a more general context and settings such as in [1,16,26,[47][48][49][50].…”

“…Blockchain is a distributed, immutable database made up of a list of "blocks" that retain data relating to transaction dates, timestamps, volumes, and/or participants [1]. When a user initiates a transaction via a peer-to-peer network, users are identified using a cryptographic identification technique.…”