An integrated decision model for evaluating educational web sites from the fuzzy subjective and objective perspectives

With advances in information and network technologies, lots of data have been digitized to reveal information for users by the construction of Web sites. Unfortunately, they are both overloading and overlapping in Internet so that users cannot distinguish their quality. To address this issue in education, Hwang, Huang, and Tseng proposed a group decision system to evaluate the quality of educational Web sites by users’ and experts’ opinions. Their investigative source is solely stemmed from human intention, called the subjective perspective, to make judgments on the quality of Web sites. However, the nature of human beings in making decisions has a gap between intention and behavior. Asking people for eliciting thought is arduous to cause this gap. Human behavior, namely the objective perspective, is the other essential source to obtain human thinking and real doings. For this reason, we can use data mining approaches to acquire the objective source. In this research, we propose an integrated decision model applied in evaluating educational Web sites from the fuzzy subjective and objective perspectives. The former source is extracted by inquiring human opinion using a questionnaire, while the latter is gained automatically by a data mining technique, fuzzy clustering. An empirical study is carried out to validate the model capability.