A comprehensive decision framework with interval valued type-2 fuzzy AHP for evaluating all critical success factors of e-learning platforms

The COVID 19 pandemic not only affected our health and social life in many aspects, but it also changed the classical way of training in classrooms and education preferences of society. As a solution various e-learning platforms were developed and preferred by many educational institutions where the individuals had the opportunity to try the advantages of e-learning platforms. Since the COVID-19 pandemic is neither the first nor the last epidemic, e-learning attracts more attention than ever before and the need for e-learning platforms is expected to be more in the near future. Thus it is necessary to define all critical success factors determining the efficiency of e-learning systems. E-learning platforms have advantages as well as disadvantages and comparisons involve uncertainties and qualitative assessments. A systematic approach should be used to determine the platforms' dimensions, features and weights of critical criteria. The motivation of our study is to determine the weights of all critical success criteria and offer a reliable method for evaluating e-learning platforms. In this study, the interval type-2 fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process was utilized to compare critical success factors of e-learning platforms. This is the most comprehensive study considering all critical success factors of e-learning platforms as an Multi Criteria decision Making problem, where 11 criteria and 106 sub-criteria were defined, evaluated and prioritized. This study provides an acceptable rationale for evaluations of e-learning platforms and the results of this study can be used in real-world performance evaluations.