Expedition to the blockchain application potential for higher education institutions

Maturity models have been introduced over the last five decades as guides and references for information system (IS) management in organizations from different sectors. In the education sector, maturity models have also been used to evaluate higher education institutions (HEIs) across several dimensions, such as information and communication technology (ICT), management, process management, course curricula, course/HEI accreditation, e-/m-learning, online courses and pedagogical strategies. In fact, HEIs are faced with enormous complexity due to the specificity and quantity of their processes. Based on the guidelines concerning a methodology for a systematic literature review, the maturity models of different subareas of education are identified and categorized in this paper. For each maturity model associated with HEIs’ ISs, the appropriate methodology for development and validation is identified, as well as the scope, stages and their dimensional characteristics. This study highlights the need to develop an IS maturity model that supports HEIs in their core business activities and management.

Blockchain-based micro-credentialing system in higher education institutions: Systematic literature review

PurposeThis systematic literature review aims to identify the main areas of study related to co-creation and innovation in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), as well as the main external and internal stakeholders with whom co-creation is made.Design/methodology/approachThe empirical approach is based on 258 articles selected from the Web of Science (WoS), Clarivate Analytics and Scopus, Elsevier databases, with analysis of titles, abstracts and keywords following a research protocol. VOS viewer and CitNetExplorer software were used, with the twin aim of identifying publications with a higher number of citations and designing maps of reference word co-occurrence.FindingsThe analysis led to three clusters being identified: Cluster 1. Management and transfer of knowledge from HEIs to companies; Cluster 2. Co-creation and innovation in HEIs through cooperation between universities and companies; and Cluster 3. Universities’ third mission and their role in developing entrepreneurship education. The results of the literature clusters analysis led to proposing a conceptual model of analysis.Research limitations/implicationsDespite only employing two databases and the content analysis criteria, the three found clusters are linked, recognising the interplay between co-creation and innovation in HEIs, knowledge transfer to enterprises and the influence on HEIs' third goal.Practical implicationsThis systematic literature review highlights and gives a picture of the state-of-the-art in co-creation and innovation in HEIs, as well as presenting a model of co-creation and innovation in HEIs that can contribute to reinforcing the University-Industry-Community ties.Social implicationsThis study can lead to a better knowledge of the issue of co-creation and innovation at HEIs, as well as a deeper analysis of the sorts of relationships between HEIs and their stakeholders, as well as its impact on surrounding areas and influence.Originality/valueThe research highlights the interaction between HEIs and their stakeholders on a basis of value co-creation and innovation, providing mutual benefits for all involved, as well as greater development and recognition of HEIs and their surrounding regions’ image andreputation. A future research agenda is also presented on the topic of co-creation and innovation in HEIs.

Purpose: With application of general strain theory, this study investigates how internal audit function and blockchain technology can be leveraged to ensure the sustainability of higher education institutions (HEIs) by combating faculty credential fraud. Faculty members with fake credentials pose a significant threat, jeopardizing the quality of education, eroding public trust, and hindering the institution's ability to attract qualified students and faculty. Methodology: A comprehensive review of existing literature and reports related to faculty credential fraud, internal audit practices, and blockchain technology is conducted. The study considers the effectiveness of internal audit and blockchain solutions in addressing faculty credential fraud within the context of HEI sustainability. Study also provides practical solutions for the development and implementation of blockchain specifically related to HEIs and defines specific measures to be taken by internal audit function towards preventing such frauds. Findings: The study reveals that faculty credential fraud poses a significant threat to the sustainability of HEIs. When faculty lack the qualifications they claim, it undermines the quality of education students receive. This can lead to a decline in student enrollment, reputational damage, and difficulty attracting qualified students and faculty, ultimately jeopardizing the institution's long-term viability. Internal audit plays a crucial role in identifying and preventing fraudulent credential use. Blockchain technology, on the other hand, offers a secure and transparent platform for verifying faculty credentials, combating document forgery, and ensuring the qualifications of teaching and research staff. Novelty: This study offers a unique perspective by integrating internal audit and blockchain technology as a comprehensive solution to address faculty credential fraud. By implementing these tools, HEIs can significantly enhance faculty credential verification processes, improve data security, and uphold the trust and credibility of their academic staff. Practical Implications: This research suggests practical measures for HEIs. These include adopting proactive measures like enhanced credential verification procedures, data analytics for identifying inconsistencies, employee education on ethical practices, and implementing blockchain-based credential verification systems. These measures collectively contribute to a more sustainable educational environment with qualified faculty delivering quality education.

Blockchain is a new technology that provides services of immutability, trust, disintermediation, collaboration, transparency. Nowadays, the use of this new technology is mostly used for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, but apart from this, blockchain technology improved the performance level of other areas of life i.e. Higher Education Institution (HEI) and stakeholders, certificate verification, and many other domains. Students and educational institutions' important data are mostly shared via different networks. The data integrity, privacy, and security are the major issues for these in blockchain technology which cannot be avoided. This paper is a documented plan for to conduct or a protocol based on which a systematic literature review would be conducted focusing on the issues, challenges, and major strengths of blockchain and its educational paradigms. The result of this review will be highly helpful for the new researchers to overcome the proposed issues and challenges, exploring educational paradigms in Blockchain, elaborate the major strengths helping the educational institutes in adapting process and increase the level of satisfaction. This study plans to explore some educational types with some issues and challenges such as scalability, immutability, and easy adaptation.

Maturity models (MM) have been introduced, over the last five decades, as guides and references for the information system management in organizations from different sectors of activities. In the education sector, MM have also been used to evaluate higher education institutions (HEI) in several dimensions, such as ICT, management, process management, course curricula, course/HEI accreditation, e/m-learning, online courses and pedagogical strategies. The HEI have an enormous complexity due to the specificity and quantity of their processes, demanding capable information systems (IS) and tools to manage these IS. Based on the guidelines of a methodology for a systematic literature review, the MM of different subareas of education are identified and categorized in this paper. For each MM associated with HEI IS, it is identified the methodology of development and validation, as well as the scope, stages and their characteristics by dimensions. This study resulted in the need to develop a MM for IS that supports HEI in their core business activities and management.

The aim of this article was to provide evidence pertaining to cloud computing (CC) adoption in education, namely higher education institutions (HEIs) or Universities. A systematic literature review (SLR) of empirical studies exploring the current CC adoption levels in HEIs and the benefits and challenges for using CC in HEIs was performed. A total of 20 papers were included in the SLR. It was discovered that a number of universities have a keen interest in using CC in their institution, and the evidence indicates a high level of successful CC adoption in the HEIs reviewed in the SLR. In conclusion, the SLR identified a clear literature gap in this research area: there exists limited empirical studies focusing on CC utilisation in HEIs.

PurposeWith the time and increase in usage of information technology (IT), blockchain technology is gaining immense attention from researchers, academicians, and practitioners because of its distinctive features such as transference, security and data reliability. The purpose of this study is to endow with a systematic review of literature on blockchain in context to the government education sector in terms of its usage, benefits, obstacles and practical implementation in future areas in education.Design/methodology/approachThe study adopted a bibliometric visualization tool to classify data in yearly publications, highly cited journals, prominent authors, leading publications in countries and institutions and highly cited papers – the data was extracted from the SCOPUS database by using relevant keywords. Thus, the following research questions were developed: How has blockchain technology been used in the government educational sector? What are the benefits examined in the field of education? What were the problems/obstacles faced using the technology in a government education structure?FindingsThe findings identify and provide a comprehensive review of the technique regarding the present research stream in terms of highest publication, author, journal, subject-wise and relevance of the technology in government education structure. Thus, the future research potential of the technology in the education sector is much more as it is in the initiation stage. A lot of opportunities and benefits need to be extracted at large.Research limitations/implicationsThe present findings of the study provide a base work for government education institutions, policy developers and researchers to investigate other areas where the technology can be implemented. Finally, more technology applications will develop strategies for proper data management and cost-effective decisions.Originality/valueThis study explains the relevance of technology in education through bibliometric visualization. The study adopted the review and significance of blockchain technology in the government education sector by identifying its benefits, current scenario, application and future research potential areas.

The operations and curriculum of higher education institutions are undergoing significant changes and challenges in the ME region. These significant changes are being driven by a number of factors and are not allowing this sector to achieve sustainability goals. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have a strong link to the use of digital transformation, especially in higher education, and those goals could be achieved with the use of digital technologies (SDG 4). Therefore, students use digital tools to enhance their learning, which include a variety of tools chosen to incorporate formalized learning environments in higher education instruction. In this article, we identify those challenges based on a systematic literature review. The study identifies hurdles to digital transformation in higher education in the ME area, including internal and external issues. Furthermore, the paper demonstrates how to employ digital transformation approaches to achieve one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals set forth by the UN and links the usage of digital transformation in ME area higher education institutions with these goals. The study provides a full understanding of impediments, allowing for effective tactics and solutions. This research article identifies the six main obstacles that face digital transformation in higher education institutions in the Middle East area, then categorizes them into five categories. Furthermore, this article identifies the role of digital transformation in achieving SDG 4, which is the quality of education in HEIs in the ME. Higher education institutions are complex, and in such an area as the Middle East, it is not easy to implement any transformation, especially digital transformation, due to numerous challenges in this area. Based on a systematic literature review, we identify such challenges in this study. The article finds both internal and external barriers to the digital transformation of higher education in the ME region. Additionally, the study ties the use of digital transformation in higher education institutions in the ME area with the 17 Sustainable Development Goals established by the UN and shows how to use digital transformation methodologies to accomplish one of these goals. Effective strategies and solutions are made possible by the study's thorough comprehension of the obstacles.

Objective: In recent years, management accounting in higher education institutions has undergone significant changes due to the various New Public Management (NPM) reforms. One of the management accounting tools that has been advised to HEIs is Activity-Based Costing (ABC). With this evolving field of research, this article aims to analyze research in international scientific journals focusing on ABC in HEIs. To this end, this article provides an overview of how research in this area has evolved. We present an overview of the past, present, and future of research in the field of the ABC model applied in HEIs. Methodology: Through a systematic literature review, the Web of Science and Scopus databases were used as a source of articles. Our analysis is based on a total of 139 articles. We used a systematic literature review combining different bibliometric techniques. These allowed us to develop a mapping of the literature on the application of the ABC model in HEIs, which helps us better understand the research related to the topic and its evolution. Results: It is concluded that the existing literature on this topic has developed along three lines of research: implementation of ABC as a cost-control method, TDABC as a time-based cost-control method, and the application of the ABC Method in health services. Originality: Based on the results found, this article identifies avenues of research that can be explored, namely the study of the application of ABC in the education sector, and provides a research agenda for future studies.

The automotive market is in the top three markets with least trust from consumers (followed by banks, and telecommunications industry) (Lades 2017). In particular, in the used car market, consumers encounter such problems as: a car in a poorer condition than initially indicated, accident damage that was not previously disclosed, little or no documentation provided, and fraud. Nobel prize winner G.A. Akerlof described the market for used cars as an example of the problem of information asymmetries and resulting quality uncertainty (Akerlof 1970). In my dissertation, I look at how an application on top of blockchain technology, which is claimed to bring trust by design due to its inherent characteristics, may be designed as a novel solution to resolve problems in the ‘Market for Lemons’ and, thus, enhance trust between buyers and sellers. While there may be some genuine trust in blockchain technology itself, on an application level, trust in an IT artifact needs to be established. This need for trust establishment is at heart of this dissertation project. This cumulative dissertation is structured in three parts. In part I, I explore the characteristics of blockchain platforms and relevant aspects for their design (i.e., the data quality aspect and token design). In part II, I propose a design to address problems associated with a of lack of trust, caused by information asymmetries, between car buyers and car sellers with the help of an IT artifact: a blockchain-based cardossier. The cardossier application reflects a car’s history over its whole lifecycle (from production to utilization). The proposed design relates to the end-user-facing frontend application. In this part, I focus on the problems and needs of used car buyers, the requirements placed for the design of the application, the actual elements of the application design, and the effects of the application’s usage in the ‘Market for Lemons’. The results show that the problems buyers experience are a paradox of having a large variety of information sources available about brands, and the quality characteristics and performance of certain models; while information about a specific car is not transparent and often even hidden. Though providing more information about a used car leads to fewer information asymmetries in general, advanced information elements are beneficial in improving the situation further. As for trust, such a system enhances trust between buyers and sellers and, in general, makes the overall purchase process more trustworthy. However, to achieve these positive effects, the quality of the stored information should be guaranteed and properly communicated to the end-user. Additionally, exploring the use of the cardossier, embedded into an online used car sales platform, several groups of factors (technology-related, data-related, design-related, user-related) that play an important role in trust formation were revealed. Furthermore, through adopting the perspective of technology affordances, we identified blockchain platform affordances related to the trust in a blockchain platform. In part III, the transfer of a research project into practice, preparation for market entry, associated tensions the blockchain consortium had to face while implementing the platform are discussed along three themes: consortium management, business value, and governance. Altogether, the three parts of the dissertation provide better understanding of blockchain platforms, applications built on top of them and their usage in the ‘Market for Lemons’. Thus, this dissertation contributes to the body of knowledge on trust design in the context of blockchain technology and applications on top of it, and also to the broader literature on examining the ‘Market for Lemons’ and solutions to its problems. As blockchain applications are still being developed, and as we are just beginning to understand the potential of the blockchain technology, such research has scientific value in terms of design and organizational implications.

Much of the excitement around blockchain is mainly due to promising applications in the financial sector. However, many also believe in the technology’s potential to disrupt non-financial sectors and applications, including supply chains, energy, e-voting, healthcare, and education. The application of blockchain within the education sector is expected to make improvements to academic transcripts, credentials, digital libraries, and student records. Research in this domain is rapidly increasing, and current reviews summarize the proposed improvements. On the other hand, the analysis undertaken has remained at a general level that lacks the depth required to cover diverging proposals that have emerged. This review focuses on the application of blockchain for academic transcripts. The aim is to find, among the proposed models, converging aspects that resolve common challenges and may lead to a universally accepted de-facto standard. Furthermore, since academic institutions will serve as oracles to the particular blockchain applications, a discussion on their trustworthiness will be outlined to explore if the proposed applications efficiently address the oracle problem. The outcome of this review highlights the need for a standardized approach built on a public blockchain to promote faster adoption and acceptance. Furthermore, oracles should be incentivized in order for the system to be sustainable, while their identities and activities should be known and identifiable.

Purpose of the paper: This paper aims to provide a systematic literature review on recycling behaviours in higher education institutions to gather and synthesise the extant knowledge on this topic into a comprehensive framework, in line with the premise that colleges and universities have the moral responsibility to educate people for a better and more sustainable future. More specifically, this study provides a basic understanding of the research topic and identifies the factors affecting recycling intentions/behaviours in higher education institutions. Methodology: A systematic literature review of existing research is conducted. A total of 64 journal articles published between 1995 and 2019 are analysed in five steps: obtaining a basic understanding, coding, categorisation, comparison and further analysis. Findings: This study identifies environmental concern, attitudes towards recycling, social norms, university environmental policy and availability of recycling facilities at higher education institutions as the factors affecting recycling intentions/behaviours in higher education institutions. Theoretical and practical implications: Scholars could use this paper as a reference to systematise knowledge on recycling behaviour in the higher education context and further advance knowledge on this topic by identifying specific research areas that could be theoretically and empirically investigated. University managers could use the findings of this study as a basis for designing behavioural intervention programs in their institutions. Originality of the paper: Previous research focuses on recycling in the home or workplace environments. No systematic literature review on recycling behaviours in the higher education setting has previously been undertaken, despite the key role universities play in increasing awareness of environmental issues.

Blockchain is a chain of blocks that are linked to each other via the Hash of the previous block. Digitalized Education sector has a lot of benefits for the student like providing one to one learning experience, flexibility in learning, etc. The Future Scope of the Education sector is vast, and new technology will be invented in the future for student’s benefit. But at the same time, Education Sector has been affected a lot due to digitalization. Security of data, the privacy of students, and working digitally are few challenges faced by the education sector. Education Sector has a pool of sensitive information for which hackers are looking. As sensitive information is stored in the traditional system they are considered to be less secure than Blockchain Technology. Forgery of a certificate, Grading assignments digitally becomes difficult, Copyright content is used for teaching students digitally, etc. are few common problems faced by the Education sector in the digital environment. Traditional systems are not capable of handling these problems as they are vulnerable to various security attacks. So, This research paper focuses on these issues and has contributed a theoretical Blockchain model to solve this problem. In this model, Verification of Accreditation and Certificate helps in solving forgery problems using smart contracts and digital signatures, which makes the work easy for recruiters to verify the certificate received from an accredited institution. Auto grading assignments make use of external AI-ML natural language processing model and smart contract to grade assignments automatically. The copyright checking model makes use of public blockchain for checking the copyrighted material and helps to monetize the copyrighted content used and then permits the rights to publish it in a private blockchain. These blockchain-based models will help in solving these issues.KeywordsBlockchainEducation sectorGradingsAIML

MOOCs are one of the most prominent topics to emerge in higher education in the past few years. Institutions that have launched successful MOOC initiatives have much to learn from each other, just as universities interested in evaluating the viability of a MOOC initiative at their institution may find lessons from others valuable for their decision-making process. This chapter explores the history and implications of MOOCs from the perspective of an institution that maintains active partnerships with multiple MOOC providers, producing numerous MOOCs every year. We outline a number of challenges, opportunities, and issues facing the adoption of MOOCs at an institution of higher education and provide recommendations for consideration. The chapter specifically addresses how MOOCs have transformed and can continue to transform the landscape of higher education, and how institutions of higher education can respond with agility to a rapidly changing landscape of tools and approaches. Based on the institutional experiences of the Technische Universitat Munchen (TUM) in developing and supporting a MOOC initiative, supported where relevant by current scholarship, we provide commentary and analysis on current public perception of MOOCs as well as a hypothesis, based on the Gartner Hype Cycle, about the future trajectory of MOOCs.