A Study of Undergraduate Use of Cloud Computing Applications- Special Reference to Google Docs (Published)
The world has been witnessed with many technological revolutions. One of them is the computing technologies. The world is able to do many things with the utilization of this innovation. There have been many revolutions such as mainframe computers, super computers, web technologies, Internet, grid computing, utility computing, etc even in the computing technologies throughout the history of the world. Cloud computing is another evolutions in the field of computing where computing is delivered as hosted services over the Internet and it has been evolved from the earlier computing technologies by the integration of some of them and removing the obstacles encountered in them as a new technology to the world. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce.com, are some of the organizations who provide this technology to organizations and personal users. Google provides a service called Google Docs, a widely used example of cloud computing. Even though many studies have examined the overall concept of cloud computing, no previous research has analyzed students’ usage and acceptance of Google Docs in a university setting. The purpose of this paper is to focuses on the factors influencing the use of Google docs as one of the SaaS offering of cloud computing services. The Theory of Planned Behavior was used as the theoretical model for this research in examining what factors influence students to use Google Docs. The interviews (n=20) and surveys (n=316) were deployed to gain a better understanding of this phenomenon. By using hierarchical regression analysis and a correlation matrix to analyze the data, it was found that all three constructs of the Theory of Planned Behavior (Attitude, Subjective Norm, and Perceived Behavioral Control) are significantly and positively correlated with intention to use Google Docs. Further, it was found that Affect, which measures a person’s emotional responses, is also a significant predictor of Behavioral Intention. The findings of this research could be used by multiple stakeholder groups to better understand the factors influencing the usage of Google Docs.
Keywords: Cloud Computing, Google Docs, Theory of Planned Behavior