Systematic Literature Review: Innovation in Digital Education—Governance, Infrastructure, and Pedagogy

This systematic literature review examines innovations in digital education from an integrated system’s perspective that views governance, digital infrastructure, and pedagogy as interdependent design dimensions. Based on a systematically collected corpus of 167 peer-reviewed studies from over 30 countries, the paper analyses international developments in the period from 2015 to 2025, thereby addressing a central research gap in previously fragmented, mostly one-sided technology-, policy- or didactics-oriented reviews. The results show that digital education reforms only have a lasting impact where technical infrastructure, pedagogical concepts, and governance arrangements are coherently aligned. Infrastructure systematically proves to be a necessary but not sufficient condition: Only through professional didactic design, continuous teacher training, and supportive organisational structures can digital technologies be translated into effective learning practices. At the same time, governance models—whether centralised, decentralised or hybrid—significantly shape the reach, quality and fairness of digital innovations by structuring investments, standards, responsibilities, and data-based control. The analysis identifies recurring trends such as the platformisation of learning environments, the growing use of learning analytics and AI-supported systems, and the differentiation between blended, hybrid and adaptive teaching, and learning formats. At the same time, persistent barriers are becoming apparent, including infrastructural inequalities, fragmented responsibilities, insufficient professionalisation and, to date, little evidence on data protection, long-term effects, and learning outcomes. Overall, the study makes a conceptual and empirical contribution by describing digital education as a co-evolutionary transformation process. It formulates design principles for policy and practice which systematically link technological decisions, pedagogical quality, and governance coherence, while also identifying key research gaps for the evidence-based further development of digital education systems.