Evaluating e-learning Web site quality in a fuzzy environment

The proliferation of the Internet and World Wide Web applications has created new opportunities as well as new challenges for institutions and individuals who are either receiving or delivering education. Electronic (e) learning is one of the most important developments in education. It recognizes the shift from teaching to learning and puts the learner or user before the institution. The objectives and expected outcomes of e-learning are largely dependent on the quality of the teaching processes and the effectiveness of online access. Hence, assessing methods for the effectiveness of e-learning Web sites are a critical issue in both practice and research. However, Web site quality is a complex concept and its measurement is expected to be multidimensional in nature. Multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) techniques are widely used for evaluating and ranking such problems containing multiple, usually conflicting criteria. For this reason, this article presents a quality evaluation model based on the MCDM to measure the e-learning Web sites' performance. In addition, the subjectivity and vagueness in the assessment process are dealt with using fuzzy logic. The study has investigated 10 worldwide and 11 locally successful Web sites with the proposed method. By suggesting an aggregated measure based on the Web site quality criteria, it is expected that the method could be useful to the e-learning service providers and system developers, as well as to the researchers related with Web research. (c) 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.