Predicting Student Intention to Use Cloud Services for Educational Purposes Based on Perceived Security and Privacy

Abstract

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.