Towards a model-based approach to evaluate the effectiveness of e-learning

There is a lack of a standard based approach that can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of different e-learning models due to their diversity and complexity. This paper introduces a new evaluation approach to assess the effectiveness of e-learning models. This approach is derived using: (i) the ISO 25010 “Systems and software Quality Requirements and Evaluation (SQuaRE): System and software quality models” and (ii) the ISO 25012 “Systems and software Quality Requirements and Evaluation (SQuaRE): Data quality model”. Hence, the proposed evaluation approach is based on the following three main models: (i) quality in use, (ii) product quality and (iii) data quality models. In this research the proposed evaluation approach has been applied to compare and evaluate capabilities of five different e-learning models. In addition to core qualities of ISO25010 and ISO25012 models, new qualities such as pedagogical, semantic and process-based techniques are defined to accommodate domain-specific aspects. The application of the proposed evaluation approach reveals promising results such as: (i) its ability to abstract the semantic heterogeneity between different terminologies used to describe the capabilities of different e-learning models and (ii) its holistic approach as well as its ability to be extended to assess unstructured e-learning contents. Additionally, this research identifies a list of e-learning models’ capabilities where some are common between different models e.g. interoperability and reusability; and others are specific to certain models such as processability.