Research of Distance Education Students Cloud Perceptions and Use Cases

Year 2015, Special Issue 2015 II, 1 - 9, 01.12.2015

Hakan Kök Hasan Erbay Emre Demir

https://doi.org/10.17275/per.15.spi.2.1

Abstract

There are 193 universities, including government and private, in Turkish higher education system. According to the 2014-15 the academic year statistics issued by the Higher Education Council, there are 2.013.672 students in associate programs whereas 3.628.800 students in bachelor degrees. Together with students from graduate degree programs, there are about six million students within Turkish higher education system. Besides, 150,000 academic personnel are employed for maintenance of education activities in higher education. This situation increases the demand on the information technologies. Nowadays, expanding areas of cloud computing such as storage, software, database, and hardware sharing are at the forefront. In addition, the cloud computing technology provides great contributions to educational activities. Within the education process in Turkey, only few researches have been conducted to determine the level of awareness toward cloud computing technology.  In this study, perceptions of students and faculty members in the higher education toward the cloud computing and their usage levels were investigated. At the first stage, by consulting to experts opinions, a survey form was created and implemented to measure participants' perception and usage status regarding cloud perception. The research sample is consisted of students and faculty members of the Hitit University. As data collected through the survey method, obtained data was processed and analyzed by SPSS Software and the relevant findings were summarized in the finding section. In further studies, it is planned to extend the study over various sampling groups from different universities. 

Keywords

Cloud Computing, Distance Education, Cloud Computing Perception

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