CLOUD-BASED E-LEARNING IN HIGHER EDUCATION: DETERMINANTS OF ADOPTION AND PSO-BASED OPTIMISATION OF SECURE FILE PROCESSING

The present study investigated cloud-based e-learning in higher education from two complementary angles: the determinants of institutional adoption and the efficient, secure processing of learner files in the cloud. The main conclusions are as follows: (1)     The four-perspective model of 42 factors was reliable and valid in a sample of 960 respondents from HEIs and technical colleges in North India (α = 0.92–0.95, CR = 0.93–0.95, AVE = 0.67–0.82). (2)     All factors were significantly associated with adoption (p < 0.001). The strongest associations were for integrity maintenance (β = 0.967), cost reduction (0.945), technological infrastructure (0.943) and encryption (0.917); the weakest were for dependence on the service provider (0.427), ease of use (0.438) and skilled end user (0.468). (3)     The security perspective had the highest mean coefficient (0.788), 14.5% higher than the organisational-challenge perspective (0.688), whereas endorsement proportions were nearly identical across perspectives (74.4–74.9%) and unrelated to the strength of association (r = −0.03). (4)     The proposed PSO-based allocation reduced single-server processing time by 12.4–23.2% relative to an existing PSO method (18.7% for the total workload), with the largest savings for large files. (5)     Increasing the number of servers from one to four reduced processing time by 45.5–59.5% (speed-up 1.84–2.47), with sub-linear scaling that improves with file size.

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