Abstract: |
People’ s educational needs and requirements change. At the same time, educational technologies and tools
also evolve. Therefore, contemporary educational methods are obliged to adapt to both. E-learning is the
mode of learning which serves the former while exploits the latter. As e-learning capabilities are moving
into the third decade of their implementation (Kulik et al., 1990), the necessity of thorough assessment is
imminent. Moreover, the adoption to e-learning of assessment features which were successfully used by e-commerce
is also a challenging issue. In this study, a novel approach is presented and put to test. The
approach tries to utilize applicable features of e-commerce technology to e-learning in an effort to measure
usage, user trends and knowledge affiliations. To the extent, some already tested indexes and metrics are
used for the quantification of qualitative features of e-learning. These indexes and metrics contribute to the
assessment of both educational content exposed by the educators and content usage by the learners. In this
paper the identified features are classified. Finally, an experimental case scenario that took place in a Greek
university e-learning platform is presented. From the revealed results there is evidence that these
corresponding to features variables can be used for the measurement of reach, richness and information
density of an e-learning platform system. |