Influence of Higher Education on IoT Acceptance through Hands-On Learning

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) applications are pervasive across various sectors; however, there remains some resistance to its adoption. Education 4.0 promotes the full integration of new technologies, both as tools for learning and instruments for professional development. This work studies the influence of higher education on the willingness towards IoT adoption after hands-on learning experiences. The primary objective is to determine whether a correlation exists between IoT adoption and the education of university students from three distinct professional degrees. The methodology employed involves a practical class where students engage in developing applications for manual data collection. These applications are designed to send data to the Internet, which is then visualized through a web interface. Tailored to each respective degree, three similar applications are developed. For this research, M5 Stack Core2 kits are utilized, along with UIFLOW programming language and the ThingSpeak platform, operating under the MQTT protocol. Following the training, students complete a Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) survey for IoT. The analysis of the influence of higher education on IoT acceptance employs ANOVA to identify differences between group means. The results reveal statistically significant differences in IoT acceptance between students in Industrial and Architecture degrees.