Distance education tool selection using novel spherical fuzzy AHP EDAS

COVID 19 pandemic, which entered our lives suddenly, caused the change of our classical education system and forced higher education institutions to switch to distance education quickly. During this time, the need for a method that can comprehensively and scientifically evaluate the alternatives of videoconferencing tools to be used in distance education has emerged. This paper proposes a novel hybrid multi-criteria group decision-making (MCGDM) model by integrating the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and the evaluation based on distance from average solution (EDAS) methodologies. The proposed model is developed with spherical fuzzy (SF) sets, which enable decision-makers (DMs) express their membership, non-membership and hesitancy degrees independently, and in a large three-dimensional spherical space. The applicability of the developed spherical fuzzy AHP EDAS is illustrated through a problem of selecting a videoconferencing tool for distance education. For this purpose, three DMs evaluate five popular videoconferencing tools, namely Zoom, Google Meet, Cisco WebEx, Skype and Microsoft with respect to six criteria, which are expanded with 32 related sub-criteria from the literature to more comprehensively handle the problem. The implications, sensitivity and comparative analyses, limitations and future research avenue are also given within the study.