A Hierarchical Framework for Evaluating Success Factors of M-Learning

There has been an enormous increase in the use of mobile learning (MLearning) systems in many fields due to the tremendous advancement in information and communication technologies (ICTs). Although, there are many frameworks that have been developed for identifying and categorizing the different components of M-Learning systems, most of them have some limitations, drawbacks, and no support for evaluating the success factors (global weights) of the system criteria. In this paper, a comprehensive hierarchical framework is developed for identifying and categorizing all components that may affect the development and deployments of cost-effective M-Learning. Furthermore, due to the hierarchical structure of the framework, analytic hierarchy process (AHP) techniques can be used to quantitatively estimate the success factors of the system criteria. In order to demonstrate the benefits and flexibility of the framework, the success factors of the different system criteria are evaluated for different sets of preferences using an interactive software tool, namely, SFacts, which is developed for calculating the success factors of the criteria of any hierarchical framework.