Evaluation of Online Teaching Quality: An Extended Linguistic MAGDM Framework Based on Risk Preferences and Unknown Weight Information

Abstract

Evaluation of online teaching quality has become an important issue because many universities are turning to online classes due to the Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. In this paper, online teaching quality evaluation is considered as a linguistic multi-attribute group decision-making (MAGDM) problem. Generally, the evaluation sematic information can be symmetrically or asymmetrically distributed in linguistic term sets. Thus, an extended linguistic MAGDM framework is proposed for evaluating online teaching quality. As the main contribution, the proposed method takes into account the risk preferences of assessment experts (AEs) and unknown weight information of attributes and sub-attributes. To be specific, the Delphi method is employed to establish a multi-level evaluation indicator system (EIS) of online teaching quality. Then, by introducing the group generalized linguistic term set (GLTS) with two risk preference parameters, a two-stage optimization model is developed to calculate the weights of attributes and sub-attributes objectively. Subsequently, the linguistic MAGDM framework was divided into two stages. The first stage maximizes the group comprehensive rating values of teachers on different attributes to obtain partial ranking results for teachers on each attribute. The latter stage maximizes the group comprehensive rating values of teachers to evaluate the overall quality. Finally, a case study is provided to illustrate how to apply the framework to evaluate online teaching quality.