Human factors’ impact leveraging cloud based applications adoption

Abstract

Cloud computing as the latest trend in the area of Information Technology and has gained a major attention during the last couple of years. Adoption of cloud based applications in the field of IT and technology and identification of key factors influencing this adoption process is of high importance. Currently, dedicated studies on the phase of adoption process in educational domains based on the cloud based applications was not paid attention, and works in this domain are very limited. On the other hand, the major studies for adoption of cloud based applications are dedicated to technological and non-human factors and few works on the human factors have been made. This study focuses on the adoption of cloud based applications in the higher education setting, and the acceptance of cloud-base applications by students in universities will be discussed respectively. In this research work, it was tried to identify the human factors influencing the cloud based applications adoption in higher education setting thorough modified version of the common Technology Acceptance Model and Actor Network Theory. The findings of this study indicate that some human factors such as Social Interaction (e.g. Exposure, Motivation) and Self efficiency can have high impact to the adoption process significantly. The results also revealed useful information in terms of literature review, comparative studies and useful methodological theories for addressing this issue.