A website quality assessment framework for educational websites: prioritizing the criteria.

Abstract

Educational websites are of strategic importance not only to the educational organization but also to the students. The quality of services provided in these organizations relies heavily on the success of their websites which support the interaction and communication with students. The main goal of this Master thesis project was to filter the existing literature and design an improved, updated website quality evaluation framework for educational websites. AHP was utilized for the prioritization of the model’s criteria and sub-criteria. For this purpose, an extensive study of the literature on existing quality evaluation models was made to recognize previously identified dimensions and their sub-criteria. A new quality assessment framework was developed consisting of criteria grouped in five dimensions, namely Content-Navigability - Structure/Design- Appearance/Multimedia-Personalization). A questionnaire based research was undertaken and the participants were asked to prioritize all criteria and sub-criteria of the proposed framework. The results show that Content credibility tops the list with a relative weight of 0.186817, almost twice the weight of the second in the list sub-criterion, Personalization of information (0.091826). Users rank Interactive features as the third most important sub-criterion in order for an educational website to be considered of high quality while the next two sub-criteria are part of the font-runner main criterion, which is content, and account for about 0.129 of the total weight. Sub-criteria regarding website’s interface such as Other Multimedia, Graphics and Personalization of Interface scored particularly small weights (<0.02).

Further research should be conducted on other types of websites (banking, e-commerce) in order to examine if the prioritization remains the same for different types of websites.