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A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (28 December 2023) | Viewed by 50481

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Special Issue Editors

Dr. Osama Sohaib

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Guest Editor

School of Computer Science, University of Technology Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia School of Business, American University of Ras Al Khaimah, Ras al Khaimah, United Arab Emirates
Interests: sustainable information systems; digital business; human-centered AI; applied machine learning; business analytics
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Dr. Muhammad Asif

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Guest Editor

Department of Computer Science, National Textile University, Faisalabad, Punjab 37610, Pakistan
Interests: information systems; data science; machine learning; sustainable systems

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Information systems (IS) consist of five components: people, hardware, software, data, and processes. To adequately explain sustainable information systems, we need to learn these IS five components serve collectively to provide the biggest possible benefit to sustainable development and value to the organization in terms of economic, social, and environmental aspects.
Sustainable IS are about the all-encompassing view of how we develop, operate, and manage IS to respond to stakeholders’ needs through the balanced consideration of environmental, economic, and social aspects. Accomplishing this adds to the firm IS management critical resources.
Research has shown that technology has an influence on the environment. However, if we are looking at how “sustainable” our use of technology is, we must consider IS components (such as hardware, software, data, people, and processes) which influence how a firm will build, deploy, use, and share its data and processes.
Sustainable IS are a significant part of corporate social responsibility. For example, in the business context, Big Data are undoubtedly a valuable source of information, but we must transform the Big Data into Sustainable Data. Sustainable management IS infrastructure provides a firm growth in terms of computing resources while becoming less dependent on energy consumption. For example, cloud computing infrastructure addresses resource efficiency. Cloud computing is then a key feature of IT environmental sustainability. However, there is a need for innovative IS applications that can increase the energy efficiency and sustainability of cloud datacenters.
This Special Issue on “Sustainable Information Systems” will address this critical and potentially wide-ranging topic. We encourage original research articles or comprehensive reviews from across diverse disciplines. Examples of contents include but are not limited to:

Sustainable information systems design;
Information systems for sustainable enterprise;
Sustainable information systems for supply chain management;
Sustainable e-commerce management;
Sustainable information management;
Sustainable Big Data;
Sustainable cloud computing in business information systems;
Sustainable healthcare systems;
Sustainable e-governance information systems;
E-learning sustainability;
Sustainable e-services.

Dr Osama Sohaib
Dr Muhammad Asif
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

information systems
sustainable information systems
sustainability
sustainable development
information management
information systems modeling
sustainable data
sustainable cloud computing
green IT

Published Papers (14 papers)

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Research

13 pages, 1609 KiB

Open AccessArticle

A Multi-Module Information-Optimized Approach to English Language Teaching and Development in the Context of Smart Sustainability

by Shiyuan Gan, Xuejing Yang and Bilal Alatas

Sustainability 2023, 15(20), 14977; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/su152014977 - 17 Oct 2023

Viewed by 728

Abstract

With high-tech advancements, intelligent, sustainable development has become widespread in daily life. However, due to developmental differences among various regions, continuity in English language teaching can be challenging. The goal of teaching in the context of sustainable development is to tailor learning plans for students through intelligent intervention. In this paper, we address the issues of classifying students’ interests and jointly assessing the listening, reading, and writing modules in online English teaching. Our results demonstrate that an autoencoder can accurately recognize students’ interests in the four modules, with a recognition accuracy as high as 93.1%. Additionally, the mean squared error (MSE) between the comprehensive assessment and the teacher’s given grade under GRUs is only 0.63, significantly outperforming other RNN-type methods. Therefore, the proposed framework in this paper is crucial in promoting future research development in the sustainable development of English teaching intelligence and the problems of multi-module assessment problem and multi-information integration. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Information Systems)

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30 pages, 1573 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Social Media Analysis to Enhance Sustainable Knowledge Management: A Concise Literature Review

by Ahmad M. Alghamdi, Salvatore Flavio Pileggi and Osama Sohaib

Sustainability 2023, 15(13), 9957; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/su15139957 - 22 Jun 2023

Cited by 2 | Viewed by 3350

Abstract

Although knowledge management relying on data from social networks has become an integral part of common practices, there needs to be a well-defined body of knowledge that explicitly addresses the process and the value generated. Sustainable knowledge management practices, which promote responsible and ethical knowledge sharing between different stakeholders, can also be facilitated through social media. This can foster a culture of continuous learning and innovation while considering the social implications of knowledge sharing. The main goal of this study is to critically and holistically discuss the impact of social media analysis in the knowledge management process holistically and maximize its value in a given context. More concretely, we conducted a systematic literature review (2012–2022) based on the PRISMA guidelines. We first approached the ideal phases of the knowledge management process and then discussed key issues and challenges from an application perspective. Overall, the study points out the positive impact of social network analysis on knowledge sharing, creativity and productivity, knowledge formulation, building trust, and cognitive capital. Additionally, value is provided in knowledge acquisition by simplifying and massively gathering information, reducing uncertainty and ambiguity, and organizing knowledge through storage, retrieval, and classification practices. At an application level, such knowledge may improve the quality of services and encourage creativity. Finally, this study analyzed specific domains, such as healthcare, marketing, politics, tourism, and event management, focusing on the potential and added value. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Information Systems)

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15 pages, 9034 KiB

Open AccessArticle

System Architecture Design of a Multimedia Platform to Increase Awareness of Cultural Heritage: A Case Study of Sustainable Cultural Heritage

by Benshuo Wang, Li Dai and Bojing Liao

Sustainability 2023, 15(3), 2504; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/su15032504 - 30 Jan 2023

Cited by 6 | Viewed by 1843

Abstract

Cultural heritage (CH) plays a vital role in passing history to the present and also the future, which means it is important to build an efficient and friendly way to broadcast and inherit these past civilizations. Information communication technology (ICT) is one of the popular methods that can attract people’s attention on understanding history or joining in heritage preservation. To achieve that, governments have built a large numbers of official ICT platforms. However, most of them neglected people’s preferences on the retrieval of cultural heritage information. In terms of user experiences, the previous platforms are less than satisfactory in increasing the awareness of the cultural heritage. Thanks to the new technology, 3D models and virtual reality (VR) bring spring life to cultural heritage. This paper developed a new multimedia platform based on people’s preferences to overcome these disadvantages. UML-based web engineering (UWE) is applied to present the web application’s architecture, the database structure, and the platform’s interface. To demonstrate the multimedia platform, Strijp-S, an industry cultural heritage site in the city of Eindhoven (the Netherlands), has been used as a case area. This proposed platform provides a new idea on system architecture design of the multimedia platform and may strengthen the public’s knowledge of cultural heritage, and thereby increase the awareness of cultural heritage to keep it sustainable. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Information Systems)

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29 pages, 1046 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Probing Determinants Affecting Intention to Adopt Cloud Technology in E-Government Systems

by Osama Abied, Othman Ibrahim, Siti Nuur-Ila Mat Kamal, Ibrahim M. Alfadli, Weam M. Binjumah, Norafida Ithnin and Maged Nasser

Sustainability 2022, 14(23), 15590; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/su142315590 - 23 Nov 2022

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 2050

Abstract

Adopting e-government services presents numerous challenges for governmental sectors in developing countries. These problems can fail some projects involving e-government. Therefore, a solution is required to address these problems. This paper presents a conceptual model and measurement to identify crucial factors that impact cloud computing technology in e-government to address the issues with e-government. According to the recent studies on technology adoption models, a theoretical model is proposed in this study. Extracting items from the literature and adapting them, creates the measurement scales for the proposed model’s structures. Through the use of face validity, pre-testing, and a pilot study, the authors confirm the scales’ content validity and reliability. The data used for this study were collected by the authors from 40 information technology IT professionals for the pilot study in the top 10 government departments in Libya who are responsible for many IT decisions in e-government. In this study, the authors first examine the reliability of the scale using Cronbach’s alpha and perform exploratory factor analysis to assess the scales’ validity. The data were analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM). The findings demonstrate that the scale measurements satisfy the standard requirements for the validity and reliability According to previous studies on cloud computing adoption from the IS perspectives, this paper theoretically provides a combination model for investigating the cloud-based implementation services to provide a more comprehensive model and the objective is to develop an empirical instrument for analyzing countries’ e-government adoption of cloud computing. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Information Systems)

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27 pages, 2463 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Identifying Challenges for Clients in Adopting Sustainable Public Cloud Computing

by Muhammad Janas Khan, Fasee Ullah, Muhammad Imran, Jahangir Khan, Arshad Khan, Ahmed S. AlGhamdi and Sultan S. Alshamrani

Sustainability 2022, 14(16), 9809; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/su14169809 - 09 Aug 2022

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 1970

Abstract

Sustainable Cloud Computing is the modern era’s most popular technology. It is improving daily, offering billions of people sustainable services. Currently, three deployment models are available: (1) public, (2) private, and (3) hybrid cloud. Recently, each deployment model has undergone extensive research. However, relatively little work has been carried out regarding clients’ adoption of sustainable public cloud computing (PCC). We are particularly interested in this area because PCC is widely used worldwide. As evident from the literature, there is no up-to-date systematic literature review (SLR) on the challenges clients confront in PCC. There is a gap that needs urgent attention in this area. We produced an SLR by examining the existing cloud computing models in this research. We concentrated on the challenges encountered by clients during user adoption of a sustainable PCC. We uncovered a total of 29 obstacles that clients confront when adopting sustainable PCC. In 2020, 18 of the 29 challenges were reported. This demonstrates the tremendous threat that PCC still faces. Nineteen of these are considered critical challenges to us. We consider a challenge a critical challenge if its occurrence in the final selected sample of the paper is greater than 20%. These challenges will negatively affect client adoption in PCC. Furthermore, we performed three different analyses on the critical challenges. Our analysis may indicate that these challenges are significant for all the continents. These challenges vary with the passage of time and with the venue of publication. Our results will assist the client’s organization in understanding the issue. Furthermore, it will also help the vendor’s organization determine the potential solutions to the highlighted challenges. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Information Systems)

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33 pages, 1379 KiB

Open AccessArticle

The Assessment of Big Data Adoption Readiness with a Technology–Organization–Environment Framework: A Perspective towards Healthcare Employees

by Ebrahim A. A. Ghaleb, P. D. D. Dominic, Suliman Mohamed Fati, Amgad Muneer and Rao Faizan Ali

Sustainability 2021, 13(15), 8379; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/su13158379 - 27 Jul 2021

Cited by 40 | Viewed by 8347

Abstract

Big data is rapidly being seen as a new frontier for improving organizational performance. However, it is still in its early phases of implementation in developing countries’ healthcare organizations. As data-driven insights become critical competitive advantages, it is critical to ascertain which elements influence an organization’s decision to adopt big data. The aim of this study is to propose and empirically test a theoretical framework based on technology–organization–environment (TOE) factors to identify the level of readiness of big data adoption in developing countries’ healthcare organizations. The framework empirically tested 302 Malaysian healthcare employees. The structural equation modeling was used to analyze the collected data. The results of the study demonstrated that technology, organization, and environment factors can significantly contribute towards big data adoption in healthcare organizations. However, the complexity of technology factors has shown less support for the notion. For technology practitioners, this study showed how to enhance big data adoption in healthcare organizations through TOE factors. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Information Systems)

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22 pages, 2042 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Development of Platform Independent Mobile Learning Tool in Saudi Universities

by Daniyal M. Alghazzawi, Syed Hamid Hasan, Ghadah Aldabbagh, Mohammed Alhaddad, Areej Malibari, Muhammad Zubair Asghar and Hanan Aljuaid

Sustainability 2021, 13(10), 5691; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/su13105691 - 19 May 2021

Cited by 5 | Viewed by 2396

Abstract

The term “mobile learning” (or “m-learning”) refers to using handheld phones to learn and wireless computing as a learning tool and connectivity technology. This paper presents and explores the latest mobile platform for teaching and studying programming basics. The M-Learning tool was created using a platform-independent approach to target the largest available number of learners while reducing development and maintenance time and effort. Since the code is completely shared across mobile devices (iOS, Android, and Windows Phone), students can use any smartphone to access the app. To make the programme responsive, scalable, and dynamic, and to provide students with personalised guidance, the core application is based on an analysis design development implementation and assessment (ADDIE) model implemented in the Xamarin framework. The application’s key features are depicted in a prototype. An experiment is carried out on BS students at a university to evaluate the efficacy of the generated application. A usefulness questionnaire is administered to an experimental community in order to determine students’ expectations of the developed mobile application’s usability. The findings of the experiment show that the application is considerably more successful than conventional learning in developing students’ online knowledge assessment abilities, with an impact size of 1.96. The findings add to the existing mobile learning literature by defining usability assessment features and offering a basis for designing platform-independent m-learning applications. The current findings are explored in terms of their implications for study and teaching practice. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Information Systems)

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25 pages, 5171 KiB

Open AccessArticle

The Effect of Organizational Information Security Climate on Information Security Policy Compliance: The Mediating Effect of Social Bonding towards Healthcare Nurses

by Ke Dong, Rao Faizan Ali, P. D. D. Dominic and Syed Emad Azhar Ali

Sustainability 2021, 13(5), 2800; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/su13052800 - 05 Mar 2021

Cited by 27 | Viewed by 4553

Abstract

The advancement of information communication technology in healthcare institutions has increased information security breaches. Scholars and industry practitioners have reported that most security breaches are due to negligence towards organizational information security policy compliance (ISPC) by healthcare employees such as nurses. There is, however, a lack of understanding of the factors that ensure ISPC among nurses, especially in developing countries such as Malaysia. This paper develops and examines a research framework that draws upon the factors of organizational climate of information security (OCIS) and social bond theory to enhance ISPC among nurses. A questionnaire was adopted in which responses were obtained from 241 nurses employed in 30 hospitals in Malaysia. The findings from the study demonstrated that the ISPC among nurses is enhanced through OCIS factors. The influence on ISPC was even more significant when examined by the mediating effect of the social bond. It implies that influential OCIS factors reinforce social bonds among nurses and eventually increase the ISPC. For information security practitioners, the study findings emphasize the prevalence of socio-active information security culture in healthcare organizations to enhance ISP compliance among nurses. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Information Systems)

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17 pages, 1333 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Resource Optimization-Based Software Risk Reduction Model for Large-Scale Application Development

by Basit Shahzad, Fazal-e-Amin, Ahsanullah Abro, Muhammad Imran and Muhammad Shoaib

Sustainability 2021, 13(5), 2602; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/su13052602 - 01 Mar 2021

Cited by 3 | Viewed by 2207

Abstract

Software risks are a common phenomenon in the software development lifecycle, and risks emerge into larger problems if they are not dealt with on time. Software risk management is a strategy that focuses on the identification, management, and mitigation of the risk factors in the software development lifecycle. The management itself depends on the nature, size, and skill of the project under consideration. This paper proposes a model that deals with identifying and dealing with the risk factors by introducing different observatory and participatory project factors. It is assumed that most of the risk factors can be dealt with by doing effective business processing that in response deals with the orientation of risks and elimination or reduction of those risk factors that emerge over time. The model proposes different combinations of resource allocation that can help us conclude a software project with an extended amount of acceptability. This paper presents a Risk Reduction Model, which effectively handles the application development risks. The model can synchronize its working with medium to large-scale software projects. The reduction in software failures positively affects the software development environment, and the software failures shall reduce consequently. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Information Systems)

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22 pages, 1875 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Evaluating Usability of Academic Websites through a Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchical Process

by AbdulHafeez Muhammad, Ansar Siddique, Quadri Noorulhasan Naveed, Uzma Khaliq, Ali M. Aseere, Mohd Abul Hasan, Mohamed Rafik N. Qureshi and Basit Shahzad

Sustainability 2021, 13(4), 2040; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/su13042040 - 14 Feb 2021

Cited by 17 | Viewed by 4063

Abstract

In the higher education sector, there is a growing trend to offer academic information to users through websites. Contemporarily, the users (i.e., students/teachers, parents, and administrative staff) greatly rely on these websites to perform various academic tasks, including admission, access to learning management systems (LMS), and links to other relevant resources. These users vary from each other in terms of their technological competence, objectives, and frequency of use. Therefore, academic websites should be designed considering different dimensions, so that everybody can be accommodated. Knowing the different dimensions with respect to the usability of academic websites is a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) problem. The fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) approach has been considered to be a significant method to deal with the uncertainty that is involved in subjective judgment. Although a wide range of usability factors for academic websites have already been identified, most of them are based on the judgment of experts who have never used these websites. This study identified important factors through a detailed literature review, classified them, and prioritized the most critical among them through the FAHP methodology, involving relevant users to propose a usability evaluation framework for academic websites. To validate the proposed framework, five websites of renowned higher educational institutes (HEIs) were evaluated and ranked according to the usability criteria. As the proposed framework was created methodically, the authors believe that it would be helpful for detecting real usability issues that currently exist in academic websites. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Information Systems)

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17 pages, 1080 KiB

Open AccessArticle

The Effect of Individual’s Technological Belief and Usage on Their Absorptive Capacity towards Their Learning Behaviour in Learning Environment

by Thomas Dolmark, Osama Sohaib, Ghassan Beydoun and Kai Wu

Sustainability 2021, 13(2), 718; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/su13020718 - 13 Jan 2021

Cited by 8 | Viewed by 2946

Abstract

Absorptive capacity is a common barrier to knowledge transfer at the individual level. However, technology absorptive capacity can enhance an individual’s learning behaviour. This study investigates that technology readiness, the tools for knowledge sources, social influences, and social networks influence an individual’s absorptive capacity on an adaptation of the individual learning behaviour. A quantitative approach is used to assess the presence of a causal relationship from the constructs mentioned above. Data were collected from university students in Australia to examine the hypotheses. With 199 responses, a partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) approach was used for the analysis. The results generated mixed findings. Individual’s technological belief in optimism and innovation and social influences had a significantly weaker effect on individual absorptive capacity, which in turn had a significantly weaker impact on their learning behaviour. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Information Systems)

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24 pages, 4629 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Green Cloud Software Engineering for Big Data Processing

by Madhubala Ganesan, Ah-Lian Kor, Colin Pattinson and Eric Rondeau

Sustainability 2020, 12(21), 9255; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/su12219255 - 07 Nov 2020

Cited by 15 | Viewed by 3608

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) coupled with big data analytics is emerging as the core of smart and sustainable systems which bolsters economic, environmental and social sustainability. Cloud-based data centers provide high performance computing power to analyze voluminous IoT data to provide invaluable insights to support decision making. However, multifarious servers in data centers appear to be the black hole of superfluous energy consumption that contributes to 23% of the global carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions in ICT (Information and Communication Technology) industry. IoT-related energy research focuses on low-power sensors and enhanced machine-to-machine communication performance. To date, cloud-based data centers still face energy–related challenges which are detrimental to the environment. Virtual machine (VM) consolidation is a well-known approach to affect energy-efficient cloud infrastructures. Although several research works demonstrate positive results for VM consolidation in simulated environments, there is a gap for investigations on real, physical cloud infrastructure for big data workloads. This research work addresses the gap of conducting real physical cloud infrastructure-based experiments. The primary goal of setting up a real physical cloud infrastructure is for the evaluation of dynamic VM consolidation approaches which include integrated algorithms from existing relevant research. An open source VM consolidation framework, Openstack NEAT is adopted and experiments are conducted on a Multi-node Openstack Cloud with Apache Spark as the big data platform. Open sourced Openstack has been deployed because it enables rapid innovation, and boosts scalability as well as resource utilization. Additionally, this research work investigates the performance based on service level agreement (SLA) metrics and energy usage of compute hosts. Relevant results concerning the best performing combination of algorithms are presented and discussed. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Information Systems)

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26 pages, 6944 KiB

Open AccessArticle

A Linked Open Data-Oriented Sustainable System for Transparency and Open Access to Government Data: A Case Study of the Public’s Response to Women’s Driving in Saudi Arabia

by Afnan MuhammadSalh AlSukhayri, Muhammad Ahtisham Aslam, Kawther Saeedi and Muhamad Sheraz Arshed Malik

Sustainability 2020, 12(20), 8608; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/su12208608 - 17 Oct 2020

Cited by 10 | Viewed by 3256

Abstract

Due to the wide-ranging development of data-oriented sustainable systems in the government and the public sectors, the development of such sustainable systems is replete with potential. The ultimate focus of developing these sustainable systems is to provide citizens with transparency, accountability, awareness as well as a single point of query for asking integrated and smart queries. In view of these benefits, the Saudi government has taken the initiative to publish and develop sustainable open data-oriented information systems. However some major challenges in the Saudi Government Open Data are that the (1) data are published and available in different formats such as Excel sheets, CSV files (Comma Separated Values), images, scanned documents and social media sources such as Twitter, (2) datasets from different government departments are not linked with each other or to existing datasets in Linked Open Data Cloud (even though they have strong links with each other), and (3) there is no SPARQL Endpoint that can be used to pose smart semantic-based queries to Saudi Government Data. This paper is part of an ongoing research project to present a framework that can be used to transfer the government data from different sources to RDF format. The framework can also be used to clean and classify/map the data according to the Saudi Government Ontology. We also describe our approach for semiautomatically linking Saudi Government Datasets with one another as well as with other existing open datasets, thus resulting in the Saudi Linked Open Government Data Cloud (SLOGDC). Finally, taking the topic “Public’s Response to Women’s Driving in Saudi Arabia” as a case study, we demonstrate the SLOGD SPARQL Endpoint as a data-oriented system by executing different queries and analyzing results of these queries. This work also contributes new insights into women’s driving in Saudi Arabia using the SLOGDC, thus suggesting the way forward in shaping policies for decision-making. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Information Systems)

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23 pages, 4832 KiB

Open AccessArticle

A Hierarchical Model to Evaluate the Quality of Web-Based E-Learning Systems

by Abdul Hafeez Muhammad, Ansar Siddique, Ahmed E. Youssef, Kashif Saleem, Basit Shahzad, Adnan Akram and Al-Batool Saleh Al-Thnian

Sustainability 2020, 12(10), 4071; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/su12104071 - 15 May 2020

Cited by 25 | Viewed by 5022

Abstract

The rapid growth of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)—specifically, the Internet—has given emergence to e-learning. Resultantly, web-based e-learning systems are being increasingly developed to enhance the learning process. However, the utilization of such systems is low, mainly owing to poor quality content and overall design problems. To improve usage, it is imperative to identify the factors with the most significant impact on the quality of these systems so that the e-learning industry keeps these factors in consideration while developing e-learning systems. This study focused on the identification and prioritization of factors related to the design quality of e-learning systems through a hierarchical quality model. Thus, firstly, an extensive literature review was conducted to identify the factors that most affect the quality of web-based e-learning systems. Secondly, among the identified factors, only those with the most significant effect were considered. To identify the most important quality criteria, a survey was conducted. An instrument was deployed among 157 subjects, including e-learning designers, developers, students, teachers, and educational administrators. Finally, a second instrument was distributed among 51 participants to make a pairwise comparison among the criteria and rank them according to their relative importance. The identified and prioritized factors were classified into four main categories. Among these four factors, content was identified as the most important factor, whereas design was found to be the least important factor. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Sustainable Information Systems)

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