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1 Introduction
The internet has facilitated the establishment of electronic learning (e-learning) education systems. The rising popularity of e-learning is attributed to its ability to enable students to study without the constraints of time and space and to reduce internal training costs for some organizations. Given this rising popularity, creating effective e-learning environments has become a top priority for educational institutions. The e-learning system in Taiwan currently plays an important role in teaching and learning at various levels of education and in various commercial and industrial training programs. Many universities in Taiwan are investing manpower and money to enhance their e-learning hardware and software infrastructure (system). Evaluating the effectiveness of e-learning is critical for those considering the adoption of such systems. The primary objective of this evaluation is to determine the effectiveness or appropriateness of an e-learning system, given a particular educational goal ([55] Wild et al. , 2002; [37] Shim et al. , 2007).
A considerable number of studies have evaluated various measures of e-learning effectiveness ([33] Roffe, 2002; [27] Mhod et al. , 2004; [25] Marks et al. , 2005). Studies have identified five primary aspects in evaluating e-learning effectiveness. These include the quality of the system, learner attractiveness, instructor attitudes, service quality, and supportive issues ([10] DeLone and McLean, 2003; [14] Hsieh, 2004; [45] Tzeng et al. , 2007; [35] Selim, 2007; [53] Wang et al. , 2007; [21] Liaw et al. , 2007; [22], [23] Lin, 2007, 2010; [38] Sun et al. , 2008; [6] Chao and Chen, 2009; [28] Ozkan and Koseler, 2009). E-learning allows learners to gain professional knowledge on their own, especially in an asynchronous system ([46] Tzeng et al. , 2005). The multi-criteria decision-making approach is suitable for the evaluation of tasks, such as e-learning, that have a variety of success measures. On the other hand, the traditional multi-criteria approach assumes independent relations between all measures ([20] Liaw, 2008), whereas in real situations, success measures are often interdependent. The process of evaluating e-learning effectiveness using a group-decision approach is very complicated, given the interdependence of measures such as linguistic preferences and subjective concepts. Hence, fuzzy set theory provides an appropriate approach to describe the measures and their levels of importance.
The challenges of this field relate to...