Evaluating the impact of cloud e-learning in higher education: An empirical investigation

Abstract

The motivation for conducting this study is to investigate the potential of Cloud e-learning to address the high-cost and high-complexity challenges of conventional learning methods for the upgraded learning processes in higher education. The overall direction of this research is driven towards how the actual usage of Cloud e-learning module affects students’ perceptions and academic performance. A Cloud e-learning module is designed and developed to promote optimised resource utilisation in the e-learning processes in higher education. A pretest-posttest method was adopted to study the impact of Cloud e-learning usage among students and whether the diffusion of Cloud e-learning has caused a change in students’ perceptions. The pretest-posttest results and students’ academic performance were then analysed to examine the impact from the actual usage of Cloud e-learning module. The findings reveal that the change of students’ perceptions is time variant, indicating students’ mixed perceptions on the usage of Cloud e-learning module. Analysis evidently reveals that the use of Cloud e-learning improved students’ learning performance in theoretical subjects. This research is useful to educators and ICT practitioners in making informed decisions in adopting the right ICT infrastructures to support e-learning in higher education.