Assessement of Distance Education Quality Using Fuzzy Sets Model

1 Ahmad M. Ibrahim, DeVry Institute of Technology, Mississauga, Toronto, Ontario, Canada L5R 3W3, [email protected] Abstract  In recent years distance education gained increased attention because of the advances in communication technology. As the number of institutions offering Internet-based distance education increases, it becomes a pressing task to evaluate, compare, and judge the quality of the education offered from different points of view. An attempt is made here to ease the difficulty of meaningful comparisons of engineering distance education by employing a model that maps the various ways we think about quality into a computer algorithm. Comparisons can then be automated leading to consistent and justifiable results. The model outlined here is based on the concepts of fuzzy sets with the objective of putting the data available on distance education offered by various institutions to a systematic use.