Abstract
The chapter presents the importance of providing high quality e-learning and the need to apply the requirements of the standards from ISO 9000 series for continual improvement of the quality management systems in education. The work applies the main principles for multiple criteria decision making. An approach for satisfaction measurement is developed. It uses weighting coefficients as qualitative valuation of the importance of the quality characteristics and numerical valuation for the level of satisfaction with the quality characteristics. The suggested approach is suitable to apply for different purposes in education in order to achieve high quality e-learning. It is also suitable to apply to different areas within quality management systems.
TopIntroduction
E-learning is becoming an education standard and the e-learning industry is gradually expanding. Providing e-learning courses is a complicated task and the various applications strongly need to interoperate and exchange data efficiently in order to better meet the needs and expectations of the students and the teaching team. E-learning standards aim to bring order in different aspects of the e-learning. Some organizations work to develop such standards. The Aviation Industry Computer-based training Committee (AICC) (http://www.bsi-global.com/en/).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Customer Satisfaction: Customer satisfaction is the customer’s perception of the degree to which the customer’s requirements have been fulfilled where requirement means: “need or expectation that is stated, generally implied or obligatory”.
Satisfaction Measurement: Evaluation of the information concerning the customers’ perception of the level at which the organization has fulfilled their requirements concerning the quality of a product (service). Customer satisfaction can be “measured” in terms of “evaluated”. It can be measured using numbers, percentages, ranks or linguistically.
Decision Maker: Person (expert, specialist or manager) or a team of such persons, that is responsible for making decisions.
Subjective Statistics: Part of the statistics, which interpret in statistical aspect the opinions, preferences, understanding, and requirements of the individual subject.
Continual Improvement of a Quality Management System: Recurring activity to increase the ability to fulfill requirements.
Quality Assurance: A set of planned and systematic activities directed to ensure that standards of quality are being met and the products (goods and/or services) satisfy customer requirements.
Quality Characteristics: Each characteristic is distinguishing feature of the product (service). The term quality characteristic is defined in the standard as inherent characteristic of a product, process or system related to a requirement.
Weighting Coefficients: The weighting coefficients are quantitative expression of the importance of the quality characteristics.
Quality Management System: Management system to direct and control an organization with regard to quality.