On the quality assessment of advanced e-learning services

Distance learning has been widely researched the past few years, nevertheless the focus has been more on its technological dimension. Designing, developing and supporting a large scale e-learning application for Higher Education is still a challenging task in many ways. E-learning is data-intensive, user-driven, and has increasing needs for multiculturalism, efficiency, adaptivity and competiveness. Although the complexity of such systems has increased exponentially, the design process still lacks a systematic quality control procedure. In this work we address the increasing need for new methods that maximize usability, and thus end-user satisfaction. We analyse the technological, managerial and economic factors that affect the design and deployment of a large e-learning platform with advanced services and propose a set of new metrics for assessing its quality. The metrics are based on the four external quality characteristics (functionality, usability, efficiency and reliability) of the ISO9126 standard for software systems.