CLOUD COMPUTING IN ROMANIAN EDUCATIONAL ENVIRONMENT - A QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
Raluca Ecaterina Brandabur · eLearning and Software for Education · 2013
Over the last years, technological items and especially IT features, have changed the entire educational universe including university environment. Nowadays teachers and students need more than ever the latest technological news in order to be connected to the more and more dynamic scientific world. In almost entire world, the educational organizations confront difficulties to access latest IT resources due modest budgets. Romanian universities do not break the rules and confront themselves with a lot of managerial and financial problems. In this case, once more, Romanian universities have serious difficulties in IT endowment. One possible solution in this case is cloud computing. The idea behind cloud computing is that the universities do not need to own all the software and hardware necessary to run the educational process. The schools can rent it and pay it per use. The present paper proposes to explain how it is perceived the usage of cloud computing paradigm in Romanian academic environment. In order to study the degree of interest, acceptance and consumption of cloud solutions at academic level, we have conducted 16 depth-interviews with vice-rectors, in the main universitary towns in Romania. For a better picture, we have investigated both humanistic and technological fields. So, the link between the degree of technological education and the degree of IT-ization must be clearly visible. The most important conclusions were not surprising: lack of knowledge about solutions, lack of managerial vision, huge bureaucratic decisional process and despite difficulty to access to highly qualified personnel in this field, less or formal of lack interest for such a solution, even in the form of consultancy services is difficult.