Cloud services in its entirety has drastically changed the perception of how industry experts and academics alike foresee the information technology sector. The reach of cloud services stretches into many sectors of society. Such sectors include the use of cloud technologies in education, which is of growing interest to academics and higher education institutions. However, many institutions adopt these services into their workflow without properly identifying the potential impacts on their students, since it is the student who engages with the new technology to enhance their knowledge base. This chapter investigates how student's perceptions of security and privacy, influences their adoption of cloud services for use in an educational setting. This study proposes that student intention to use a cloud service (e.g., DropBox) for academic purposes can be predicted upon their perception of security and privacy when using a specific cloud service.
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Over the years evolution in technology has brought about a transformation to the educational system. Consequently, educational institutions and students are increasingly incorporating Internet-based applications into their academic workflow, which is also meant to enhance teaching and learning activities. This transformation has resulted in student reliance on Internet-based applications for learning activities (Saini & Kaur, 2017). Internet-based applications are also referred to as Software as a Service (SaaS), which is one of the few paradigms of cloud computing. The remaining paradigms being Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) (Ali, 2019). The adoption and implementation of cloud computing has been under the spotlight by many researchers. However, many of these researchers who study SaaS in academic environments, mainly focus on the impact of SaaS applications on the educational institution itself. Subsequently, neglecting to investigate the “core” of the educational institution, which is the student body. Qasem et al. (2019) advises that more academic attention is needed to investigate the factors that affect the adoption of cloud computing in higher education institutions.
The literature pertaining to cloud computing presents a correlation among the definitions of underlying concept of cloud computing. In general, cloud computing is defined as, any kind of software services or computing resources that are provided or accessed through the capabilities of a network infrastructure – commonly the Internet (Mell & Grance, 2011; Mitra & Gupta, 2019). Examples of cloud computing services are storage and database systems, servers, software and development platforms (Saini & Kaur, 2017; Muhairat et al., 2019). An example pertaining to cloud computing for education is Google Apps for Education, which is a suite of applications that Google permits schools and other educational institutions to use free of charge. Higher education institutions, like colleges and universities, implement three kinds of cloud computing models, that is private clouds where institutions establish their own cloud computing environment, whilst governments have capitalized in shared clouds for universities. Additionally, universities acquire cloud services from third-party cloud service providers (Ali, 2019). Cloud computing for educational purposes have various associated benefits and challenges when deployed (Arpaci, Kilicer, & Bardakci, 2015). The apparent benefits associated with the adoption of cloud computing by higher education institutions are quality services, cost reductions, rapid advancements in technologies, customisability of cloud services and improved efficiency (Ali, 2019).
The factors that influence the adoption and use of cloud services are: accessibility of online applications, flexibility of learning environments, mobile learning support, availability of specialized software applications, cloud-based computing, cost reductions of hardware, software and operations, collaborative working, virtualisation, quality of service, data security and privacy (Qasem et al.,2019). Furthermore, cloud services are being marketed as safe alternatives for physical storage, as the data is password protected and ‘disaster proof’ (Saini & Kaur, 2017). However, according to Akande and Van Belle (2014), security is one of the biggest challenges that influence the adoption cloud services. This is due to the data owner’s lack of control of their data, once it is uploaded onto the cloud service provider’s infrastructure (Ali, Khan, & Vasilakos, 2015). This study seeks to understand how challenges related to SaaS (specifically, security and privacy) affect student engagement with cloud services for academic work. Such applications, classified as Software as a Service (SaaS), impact how students interact with their academia, lecturers and peers. Ideally, students aim to adopt cloud services that they feel safe using, ensuring data privacy and integrity.
This study investigates how student’s perceptions of security and privacy, influences their adoption of cloud services for use in an educational setting. The findings from this study may prove valuable for an educational institution that is considering the adoption of cloud computing, since it will be useful in understanding student perception towards cloud-based learning platforms/resources. Factors affecting students’ usage of cloud services (SaaS) can be argued to determine the success of cloud services in education. However, the evolution of technology needs to be first explored, in order to understand more about cloud technologies.