Exploring Cloud Computing Adoption in Higher Educational Environment: An Extension of the TPB Model with Trust, Peer Influences, Perceived Usefulness and Ease of Use

Cloud computing is regarded as the next generation of computing. It is progressively being used as a launching pad for digital innovation and organizational agility. Cloud computing is frequently used by private and public organizations due to its flexibility, collaboration, cost-effectiveness, and scalability. These characteristics make cloud computing indispensable for individuals and businesses such as higher education institutes. Several prior studies covered the technological facets of cloud-based contexts, including cloud security, scalability, and virtualization. However, it is contend that the main barrier to cloud computing isn't technical but cognitive or behavioural, and in particular attitudinal. Thus, this research aims to study higher education’ students’ attitudes and their intention to adopt cloud computing, with a specific concentration on the effect of trust, peer influences, perceived usefulness and ease of use in order to investigate the factors influencing the adoption of cloud computing in higher educational environment in Saudi Arabia. This study presents an extended Decomposed Theory of Planned Behaviour (DTPB) to include trust, peer influences, perceived usefulness and ease of use as a cognition, representing a person’s perception of social influence to perform or not perform a behaviour under consideration. The proposed model was able to explain 62% of the variance in behavioural intention and 65% of students' attitudes towards the adoption of cloud computing in higher educational environment. The study's findings show that the proposed model explained a significant amount of variation in cloud computing adoption. It suggests that the model expansion by incorporating trust, peer influences, perceived usefulness and ease of use factors were valuable explorations. Further, the findings demonstrate that university students' attitudes toward using cloud computing are significantly influenced by perceived ease of use, trust in cloud computing service provider and perceived usefulness, which have the ability to explain their attitude by 22.15%, 21.9% and 20.9% respectively. The result also shows that "subjective norm" alone explains 33.95% of students' "behavioural intentions" towards using cloud computing, followed by their "attitude," which explains around 14.24% of "behavioural intentions," and then university students’ "self-efficacy," with 13.71%.