In the last few years, most of the public universities in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) have adopted electronic learning (e-learning) as an evolutionary educational platform both by choice and by demand. Despite its many advantages, it has increased the ethical and moral challenges faced in the form of the violations of academic integrity that exist in traditional education. Universities all over the world are struggling to overcome these issues. Keeping this in mind, the purpose of this paper is to investigate and priorities the factors of violating academic integrity within Saudi Arabian universities. Based on the previously published literature and using Delphi-based discussions with e-Learning experts, this paper has identified twelve major factors which were related to e-Learning environment, Awareness on Academic Integrity, and e-Learning guiding principles. Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) was used to prioritize these factors. It was concluded that inappropriate guidelines provided to students was the most contributing factor while Shortage of feedbacks was least contributing factor among all the identified factors. INDEX TERMS E-learning, ethics, challenges, academic integrity, AHP, Delphi.
The rapid growth of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)—specifically, the Internet—has given emergence to e-learning. Resultantly, web-based e-learning systems are being increasingly developed to enhance the learning process. However, the utilization of such systems is low, mainly owing to poor quality content and overall design problems. To improve usage, it is imperative to identify the factors with the most significant impact on the quality of these systems so that the e-learning industry keeps these factors in consideration while developing e-learning systems. This study focused on the identification and prioritization of factors related to the design quality of e-learning systems through a hierarchical quality model. Thus, firstly, an extensive literature review was conducted to identify the factors that most affect the quality of web-based e-learning systems. Secondly, among the identified factors, only those with the most significant effect were considered. To identify the most important quality criteria, a survey was conducted. An instrument was deployed among 157 subjects, including e-learning designers, developers, students, teachers, and educational administrators. Finally, a second instrument was distributed among 51 participants to make a pairwise comparison among the criteria and rank them according to their relative importance. The identified and prioritized factors were classified into four main categories. Among these four factors, content was identified as the most important factor, whereas design was found to be the least important factor.
Different researches evidenced that elearning has provided more opportunities to behave unethically than in traditional learning. A descriptive quantitative enquirybased study is performed to explore same issue in eLearning environments. The factors required for ethical development of students were extracted from literature. Later, efforts are made to assess their significance and their status in eLearning with 5point Likert scale survey. The sample consisted of 47 teachers, 298 students, and 31 administrative staff of elearning management being involved in eLearning. The work also observed state of students on various ethical behaviors. The study emphasized that the physical presence of teacher, an ethically conducive institutional environment, and the involvement of the society members are among the main factors that help in the ethical development of a student which are missing in eLearning. The results of the study showed that the moral behavior of eLearners is at decline because of lack of these required factors in eLearning. This work also suggested the need of a model indicating how these deficiencies can be addressed by the educational institutions for ethical development of higher education learners.
Abstract-ElectronicLearning (E-Learning) in the education system has become the obvious choice of the community over the globe because of its numerous advantages. The main aim of the present study is to identify Critical Success Factors (CSFs) and validate them for successful implementation of the E-Leaning at Saudi Arabian Universities. This study developed a multidimensional instrument for measuring the E-Learning CSFs in the higher educational institutions of Saudi Arabia. The study reviewed various CSFs from literature and identified most important E-Learning CSFs which are described and grouped in five dimensions such as Student, Instructor, Design and Contents, System and Technological, and Institutional Management Services. The 36 CSFs falling under these relevant dimensions were then validated their importance quantitatively through university Students, Instructors, and E-Learning staffs of some well-known universities in Saudi Arabia. A survey instrument was developed and tested on a sample of 257 respondents of Saudi Arabia Universities. It was found that System and Technological dimension is the most significant as perceived by respondents. Results of the study discovered that all obtained factors are highly reliable and thus would be useful to develop and implement E-Learning systems.
In the higher education sector, there is a growing trend to offer academic information to users through websites. Contemporarily, the users (i.e., students/teachers, parents, and administrative staff) greatly rely on these websites to perform various academic tasks, including admission, access to learning management systems (LMS), and links to other relevant resources. These users vary from each other in terms of their technological competence, objectives, and frequency of use. Therefore, academic websites should be designed considering different dimensions, so that everybody can be accommodated. Knowing the different dimensions with respect to the usability of academic websites is a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) problem. The fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) approach has been considered to be a significant method to deal with the uncertainty that is involved in subjective judgment. Although a wide range of usability factors for academic websites have already been identified, most of them are based on the judgment of experts who have never used these websites. This study identified important factors through a detailed literature review, classified them, and prioritized the most critical among them through the FAHP methodology, involving relevant users to propose a usability evaluation framework for academic websites. To validate the proposed framework, five websites of renowned higher educational institutes (HEIs) were evaluated and ranked according to the usability criteria. As the proposed framework was created methodically, the authors believe that it would be helpful for detecting real usability issues that currently exist in academic websites.
Information Technology (IT) is influencing the organizations to change their operations and business process. The development of IT, especially in education, influences all organizations to adopt electronic learning (e-Learning). Elearning is becoming more popular day by day and organizations tend to emphasize on its benefits. Almost all organizations have been transformed from traditional learning to e-Learning. Does this mean that e-learning is without limitations? This new mode of learning is not based on the moral and behavioral ethics. Additionally, e-Learning organizations do not take into consideration any means or effort to prevent unethical behaviors of student. On the other hand, Islam emphasizes greatly on ethics and has its own philosophy of teaching and learning. The main aim of this research is to identify the challenges of e-Learning and propose a model for e-learning which might be a roadmap for all organizations all over the world to adopt it. The focus of this new proposed model is to incorporate ethics and guidelines in e-Learning system from the major sources of Islam i.e. the Quran and the Sunnah of the Prophet Muhammad ( ﻋﻠﻴﻪ اﷲ ﺻﻠﻰ )وﺳﻠﻢ
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