Determining the importance of the components of e-Learning of Work and Technology Course from experts’ perspective

In the last century, that is the era of transition from the industrial age to the information and communication age, education has changed dramatically compared to the past, both in terms of quantity and quality. The advent of information technology has changed all aspects of human life; Meanwhile, educational systems have been more affected by information technology than other systems due to their epistemological nature. Until a few years ago, people needed a certain amount of time and space to teach and learn, but today, with the advancement of computer technology and the Internet, this need has somewhat disappeared, and everyone will soon be able to learn anything at any time and in anywhere. Traditional teaching methods are no longer able to meet the needs of the continuous growth and development of educational skills. The use of technology in education has created elearning systems and has changed the role of educational elements and educational design. The aim of the present investigation thus is to determine the importance of the components constituting the e-learning of the Work and Technology course from Experts’ Point of view.

The approach of the investigation is quantitative and a hierarchy analysis method is used. This method can be used when the decision-making process is involved with several competing options and decision-making criteria. The proposed criteria can be quantitative or qualitative. Then a series of pairwise comparisons are made. These comparisons determine the weight of each factor in line with the competing options. Finally, the logic of hierarchical analysis integrates matrices of pairwise comparisons with each other to make the optimal decision. The community of the investigation was experts of the training domain, the modern technologies planning domain, and Work and Technology course domain which 18 people of them were selected purposefully as samples. In order to analyze the data, the technique of index paired comparison was used. In this study, the data collection instrument was a questionnaire and its indicators included the components of e-learning, which were classified under a total of 10 indicators. In the current study, the coefficients of importance of the indicators have been studied. These indicators were then presented to the research sample in a questionnaire, and the indicators were analyzed by Expert Choice Software (Expert Choice 11) based on the hierarchical analysis method. To analyze the data, the pairwise comparison technique of the indicators was used.

Based on the obtained results, the most important components of e-learning from the experts' point of view are content (with a weight of 0.116), page design (with a weight of 0.128), organization (with a weight of 0.124), motivation (With a weight of 0.099), flexibility (with a weight of 0.093), evaluation (with a weight of 0.092), feedback (with a weight of 0.098), a balanced workload (with a weight of 0.090), assistance (Weighing 0.81 and teaching-learning activity (weighing 0.079).

It is evident that the findings of the present study help the decision-makers to adopt effective strategies for training courses as the most important components constituting the e-learning are specified and thereby the decision-makers may control the levels of resource assignments.