A Model for the Design of Virtual University’s Website Using Multicriteria Decision Making

Abstract

Abstract: To meet the increasing demand for higher education, universities are questing for new ways of delivering education and as a result, e-learning is being implemented more frequently each day, creating new opportunities for both educational institutions and students. Likewise, every online organization, the website of an educational institution is the first interaction tool between the user and the organization and plays an important role in establishing long term relationships with students. To face this strategic issue for virtual universities, this paper focuses on improving website quality based on users’ information and structural needs. By considering that the basic goal of every website is to provide the user with information, first, proper content for a university website from the users’ perspective will be selected, and then a framework for Iranian universities’ websites will be proposed. Selecting proper content items from a website is a selection problem with different criteria influencing the optimal solution. Therefore, in this paper, multicriteria decision making approach is taken toward this selection problem.

Keywords

• key words: electronic learning
• educational website
• multicriteria decision making
• topsis method