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Blockchain adoption in education: a systematic literature review

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Abstract

The rapid development of blockchain technology has influenced several fields, including financial, healthcare, and supply chain systems. Recently, this technology has also been applied in education thanks to its unique features, including decentralization, trustworthiness, and security. Despite the bright side of blockchain, several concerns continue to undermine its adoption in education, such as legal, immutability, and scalability issues. Thus, a comprehensive survey about blockchain adoption in education deems necessary. This paper is a systematic literature review of blockchain applications in the education field. To do so, and after retrieving scientific publications on the topic, we classify the outcomes according to several categories. In this paper, we focus on two major themes: educational applications and benefits of blockchain integration. We combine the themes, then express and analyze the results as bubble charts. We analyze the proposed solutions in terms of the blockchain-based applications that have been developed for educational purposes and the benefits that the blockchain technology could bring to the education field. Finally, we describe some research gaps that need to be addressed and educational areas that could be explored for future research of blockchain adoption in education.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Univ. Polytechnique Hauts-de-France, LAMIH, CNRS, UMR 8201, F-59313, Valenciennes, France

    Faiza Loukil & Mourad Abed

  2. INSA Hauts-de-France, F-59313, Valenciennes, France

    Mourad Abed

  3. Mir@cl Laboratory, Sfax University, Sfax, Tunisie

    Khouloud Boukadi

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  1. Faiza Loukil
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  2. Mourad Abed
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  3. Khouloud Boukadi
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Correspondence to Faiza Loukil.

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Loukil, F., Abed, M. & Boukadi, K. Blockchain adoption in education: a systematic literature review. Educ Inf Technol 26, 5779–5797 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-021-10481-8

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