ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the need for higher education institutions to modernize and embrace the post-digital age. This study evaluates students' perspectives of utilizing MS Teams as a means of facilitating remote learning during the pandemic. The Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) was employed as the theoretical framework to examine students' views on self-efficacy, facilitating conditions, ease of use, usefulness, and intention to use. The results showcase positive views of MS Teams, with self-efficacy rated the highest among the five constructs, followed by ease of use, facilitating conditions, intention to use, and usefulness. Additionally, no significant differences were found in students' perceptions based on gender. MS Teams has proven to be a successful platform for delivering online learning and communicating, bridging the divide of distance and time in teaching and learning. As discussions about the future of higher education in the post-pandemic world have commenced among academia and university officials, it is crucial to consider the impact of COVID-19 on student learning and provide suggestions for a more sustainable and effective post-pandemic education. © 2023 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
The Covid-19 pandemic has created unprecedented challenges in the technology age. Previous infrequently used applications were pushed into the spotlight and had to be considered reliable by their users. Applications had to evolve to accommodate the shift in normality to an online world quickly, predominantly for businesses and educational purposes. Video conferencing tools like Zoom, Google Hangouts, Microsoft Teams, and WebEx Meetings can make communication easy, but ease of online communications could also make information easier for cybercriminals to access and to use these tools for malicious purposes. Forensic evaluation of these programs is important, as being able to easily collect evidences against the threat actors will aid investigations considerably. This paper reports how artefacts from two popular video conferencing tools, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet, could be collected and analysed in forensically sound manners. Industry standard cyber forensics tools have been reported to extract artefacts from range of sources, such as memory, network, browsers and registry. The results are intended to verify security and trustworthiness of both applications as an online conferencing tool. © 2022, ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.
ABSTRACT
With the sudden outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic all over the world, the education sector has experienced a tremendous transformation from its tradition way of providing lectures to the online mode of lectures. The online meeting platforms play a significant role in enhancing the online learning experience of the students. There are many online meeting platforms available, which offer several similar features yet provide different experiences to the users. It is important to evaluate the most preferable online meeting platform for the education sector to improve the overall education quality especially in the online learning era. This study, therefore, evaluates the preference of higher education students' preferences for online meeting platforms. For this study, three most commonly used online platforms i.e., Google Meet, MS Teams, and Zoom are considered. The evaluation process is done using cross-tabulation analysis and Chi-Square analysis. The results obtained in this study suggests that Google Meet is the most preferred online meeting platform by the students. This study provides an insight about the platform that can be used by the educators to improve the overall learning experiences of the students. © 2021 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
The choice of software for implementing online learning has always been one of the fundamental problems in education sciences. Efficiency and quality of education largely depend on the properties of the tool (software) that the teacher uses. The COVID-19 pandemic has led to the rise in numbers of users of e-learning tools. Decision makers had to choose which available product their corporation, university or school would use. After several months of widespread implementation of different e-learning software, users are ready to give an evaluation. The aim of this paper is to provide such evaluation on MS Teams, which can be obtained by applying Technology Acceptance Models. Among the set of Technology Acceptance Models developed in science and verified in practice, the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) deserves special attention due to its flexibility and large predictive power. We propose an enriched UTAUT model for MS Teams, which adds two new variables to the original: Product Superiority (PS) and System Comprehensiveness (SC). This paper presents the development of Technology Acceptance Models as a software evaluation method, followed by the presentation of hypotheses and description of the research method used. The research was carried out using the questionnaire distributed among university teachers from northern Poland. We present the analysis of the results along with the conclusions formulated on their basis. At the end, we highlight the interpretative limitations and indicate further research directions. © 2022, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.