Pedagogical Evaluation of E-Learning Websites with Cognitive Objectives

Abstract

E-learning has known a large expansion in the past decades due to the advent of the Internet as a major communication medium and the WWW as a technology that provides enormous capabilities for information exchange anytime, anywhere, anyhow. Few studies exist on the evaluation of e-learning Websites in terms of their pedagogical quality that is on their success in helping learners learn through specific pedagogical principles. Pedagogical evaluation, however, is very important in e-learning as it can improve the quality of the system greatly and help the decision maker choose the most appropriate among different systems or designs. This chapter proposes a multi-criteria evaluation model for e-learning Websites based on well-known pedagogical principles, namely Bloom’s taxonomy of six cognitive objectives, Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation.