A systematic study on blockchain technology in education: initiatives, products, applications, benefits, challenges and research direction.

Blockchain facilitates the education sector from its unique bundles of characteristics, like decentralization, immutability, reliability, transparency, traceability, security, and integrity. These characteristics improve the ecosystem's accountability, collaboration, credibility, identification, transparency, and trustability. Despite these attractive features and benefits, blockchain technology in education still needs to overcome many challenges that require consistent effort. This paper systematically studies leading blockchain proposals in the education sector. Our study mainly focuses on four categories: (i) Blockchain-based initiatives, (ii) Existing blockchain-based products/solutions, (iii) Applications/Use cases, benefits and challenges in the adoption of blockchain, and (iv) Future research direction in the education sector. We categorize the distinct challenges based on the Technology-Organization-Environment (TOE) framework. This article covers research articles published in eight well-known scientific databases between 2017 and the first quarter of 2023. We screen the articles with the help of the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis) approach. This article also explores other educational areas that could benefit from blockchain due to its potential and attractive features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]