A survey on the utilization of cloud computing services for academic learning

Abstract

With the rapid innovations of storage and powerful computational processing technologies, as well as the achievements of the Internet have made computing resources to be affordable at reduced pricing and more available than ever before. This technological drift has facilitated the recognition of a novel computer technology called cloud computing. Thus, enabling its resources to be provisioned as collective services that can be leased by cloud service providers to end users via the Internet in an on-demand approach. The education sector in the developed countries is achieving more knowledge and benefits from cloud services, as they shift more of their core academic learning activities onto the cloud platforms. However, Institutions in developing countries such as Nigeria, have not yet embraced this rapidly growing technology to facilitate their academic learning environments. Therefore, this paper tends to carry out a survey to investigate the perception of students in three higher Institutions (located in Delta State, Nigeria) about their perception of cloud computing usage and its benefits in academic learning. The investigation was achieved with the aid of a questionnaire survey. Thus, the results obtainedshow that most of the students have the awareness of cloud computing but are yet to explore its services in their studies and learning. Furthermore, the tendency of adopting cloud services to facilitate learning by the students is reasonably in the increase. However, there are some issues such as funding and access to free network/ Internet broadband are to be addressed before the realization of the said technology will be adopted massively by the students.

Keywords: Cloud Computing, Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Cloud Service Providers (CSPs)