Analyzing the Users’ Acceptance of an IoT Cloud Platform Using the UTAUT/TAM Model

Abstract

The instructional design of meaningful experimental activities completely integrated into on- line Engineering courses is still a significant challenge, by following the sustainable development goal of the United Nations for quality education, the SDG number 4. Remote and virtual laboratories can be a solution to improve this design in distance methodology. This fact has been more noticeable during the COVID-19 pandemic and its consequences with respect to education. Its transparent integration into the learning process and the inclusion of learning analytic features are essential features of these kinds of technologies. Without them, lecturers cannot track the performance and the satisfaction of their students. Our LoT@UNED (Laboratory-of-Things@UNED) platform has been implemented to include all these educational features for IoT environments, ranging from edge to cloud computing. Taking the advantages of the IoT paradigm, this platform involves acquiring practical competences within IoT and edge-cloud programming topics, among others. Furthermore, its flexibility allows us to host other areas, such as cybersecurity. Specifically, our platform incorporates a set of sustainable capabilities (scalability, availability, and security), so contributing to the SDG 4 challenge with a low-complex and efficient solution for quality distance education. To analyze the impact of our proposed solution, this work also focuses on studying the influence among several acceptance UTAUT/TAM factors during the students’ learning and teaching process. To achieve this goal, both exploratory and confirmatory analyses have been conducted. The reliability and validity of data are also analyzed. An improved structural equation model has also been studied, satisfying several statistical indicators according to the recommended thresholds in the current literature. The usefulness of our platform, easing the users’ attitude and having a high availability of resources affect positively the intention of use our IoT cloud solution and, as a consequence, the great quality of the education process.

Keywords

• Cloud computing
• distance education
• sustainable development goals (SDGs)
• evaluation
• IoT learning environments
• SEM