An evaluation of public cloud adoption for higher education: A case study from Pakistan

There has been a global change of perception about right to education over the past few decades. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are one of such advanced means to access educational material and resources anywhere/anytime in the world. Invention of cloud computing technology has opened many options for organizations and individual to share the educational resources among students. By adopting cloud computing organizations can save various recurring costs such as ICT hardware/software, licensing, storage space, backups, maintenance and human resources. Cloud computing enables teachers and students to access and approach the academic material ubiquitously through portable appliances (smart phones, tablets, IPAD's etc.). There are numerous public cloud applications (offerings) available for accessing educational resources in urban as well as rural vicinity. The Usability evaluation of these cloud-based services in a particular academic atmosphere is significant prior to their adoption. Moreover, this enables the stakeholders to make better decisions to adopt these contemporary services. In this paper we present the usability evaluation of public cloud applications across three universities in Pakistan from stakeholders' perspective i.e. (teachers and students). Our experimental results show that there is lack of awareness on using cloud-based services for accessing educational resources.