# Challenges of Using Blockchain in the Education Sector: A Literature Review
## 4 Discussion and Future Directions  
The purpose of this study was to review published articles describing the challenges of using blockchain technology for higher-education institutions. These barriers have been divided into three contexts, based on the TOE framework: technological, organizational, and environmental contexts. The technological challenges are as follows: poor usability, a lack of scalability, limited interoperability, and standardization (classified under the immaturity of the blockchain challenge), the complexity of integration, security issues, privacy, immutability, lack of flexibility, and data unavailability. In the organizational context, there is a lack of adequate skills, financial barriers, and a lack of management commitment and support. In the environmental context, there are legal issues and a lack of regulatory compliance, market and ecosystem readiness, and sustainability concerns (see Figure 3). This review showed that technological challenges received more attention from the reviewed articles than challenges in the other two contexts. Eight technological challenges were reported in 29 articles, three organizational challenges were identified in 10 articles, and three environmental challenges were reported in five articles (see Figure 4). This is due to the technological novelty and immaturity of blockchain technology. However, this reflects a research gap, in terms of organizational and environmental challenges, that will have a negative impact and will increase resistance to the acceptance of this technology in the education sector. For example, the lack of commitment by senior management leads to a barrier to blockchain adoption because the coherence of sustainable educational blockchain system processes could be affected. In addition, this will have an impact on resource management and spending decisions, which could affect the support  
Figure 4: The number of challenges and articles in each context in the TOE framework. Figure 3: The challenges reported by the selected articles. needed for the adoption of blockchain technology. Therefore, more research is needed from an organizational and environmental perspective. Immaturity is one of the most important challenges for blockchain adoption in higher education. This review showed that fourteen of the reviewed articles reported that blockchain still suffers from certain immaturity problems, from different angles such as the poor usability of blockchain-based applications and solutions. Despite the importance of this aspect, usability was not the focus of the selected article, and other issues such as security and privacy received more attention. Therefore, the usability of blockchain should be improved through new user-friendly interfaces that better meet the needs of users, while students, academics, and administrative staff should receive training on how to use the technology. Another challenge reported by the selected articles is the limited interoperability and standardization. The absence of uniformity among blockchain protocols compromises the consistency of fundamental processes, such as security, and makes mass acceptance almost impossible. Therefore, establishing common standards for different blockchain protocols could assist enterprises to collaborate on application development, validate proofs-of-concept, and share blockchain solutions, as well as integrate with legacy systems. In addition, the lack of standards affects the security of the blockchain as there is no central expert, authority, or organization that can make a decision. Furthermore, the regulatory educational authorities play a key role in managing different aspects, such as degree attestation and verification standards, the secrecy and integrity of candidate certificates credentials, the quality and reliability of the system, security, data protection, and the exchange of records between academic institutions and regulatory educational authorities. Blockchain is a secure technology, but it still suffers from security attacks.