Multi-expert and multi-criteria evaluation of Online Education Factors: A fuzzy AHP approach

Abstract

Abstract : COVID-19 has highly impacted industry, agriculture, services sector as well as education sector all over the world. The countries have seen a complete lockdown, and it has badly affected students' lives in the education sector. Almost more than 32 crores of learners are unable to move to schools or colleges in India. The solution to overcome the offline education crisis is to move to online platforms. But, the effectiveness of online platforms for teaching is a big challenge. The most important thing in teaching is achieving the satisfaction level of students. The literature shows many factors impact satisfaction level, and these factors are ICT orientation, Big-Five Personality Dimensions, Instructor Quality, and Course Design. These factors are having subfactors four, five, seven, and six, respectively. The current study targets to prioritize the factors by using the fuzzy AHP approach. The factors are pritorized based on their normalized weight. To gain depth insights, thesub-factors are also prioritized, and they are ranked relatively as well as globally. Relatively means to figure out the important and least sub-factor from the corresponding factor, globally means to rank each sub-factor among all identified factors. The results show that BF is the most important and CD is the leastimportant factor for achieving students satisfaction level. Looking at relative weights, NE and LQ are the most important factors among BF and CD, respectively. After considering global weights, PI and AD are the most and least important sub-factors, respectively. Keywords: Online Classes, Fuzzy AHP, Instructor Quality, ICT Orientation, COVID 19