On the quality assessment of advanced e‐learning services

Abstract

Distance learning has been widely researched the past few years, nevertheless the focus has been more on its technological dimension. Designing, developing and supporting a large scale e-learning application for Higher Education is still a challenging task in many ways. E-learning is data-intensive, user-driven, and has increasing needs for multiculturalism, efficiency, adaptivity and competiveness. Although the complexity of such systems has increased exponentially, the design process still lacks a systematic quality control procedure. In this work we address the increasing need for new methods that maximize usability, and thus end-user satisfaction. We analyse the technological, managerial and economic factors that affect the design and deployment of a large e-learning platform with advanced services and propose a set of new metrics for assessing its quality. The metrics are based on the four external quality characteristics (functionality, usability, efficiency and reliability) of the ISO9126 standard for software systems.

Customer satisfaction using website functionality, perceived usability and perceived usefulness towards online shopping in India

“…Wolfinbarger and Gilly (2003) identified usability, information availability, product selection and appropriate personalization as dimensions of website design and fulfilment / reliability, customer service and privacy / security as important factors of online shopping. Stefani et al (2006) and Seffah et al (2008) incorporated security as a website functionality factor. Kim and Stoel (2004) identified six dimensions, viz.…”

Managing the quality of e‐learning resources in repositories

“…This means that the software quality characteristics defined in the standard ISO/IEC 9126, which is progressively replaced by the series ISO/IEC 25000, could be applied to LO . In fact, Stefani, Vassiliadi, and Xenos proposed four metrics defined in the ISO/IEC 9126 as factors for quality assessment of e‐learning resources . Quality assessment for learning can be also based on the standard ISO/IEC 19796, the only international standard for quality management, assurance, and metrics in e‐learning .…”

The relative importance of usability and functionality factors for online auction and shopping web sites

“…Security is one of the major concerns of commercial web site customers (Bontis and De Castro, 2000). Calero et al (2005), Stefani et al (2006) and Seffah et al (2008) included security as a functionality factor in their research.…”