Online education satisfaction assessment based on cloud model and fuzzy TOPSIS

Xiuqin Xu; Jialiang Xie; Honghui Wang; Mingwei Lin

doi:10.1007/s10489-022-03289-7

Online education satisfaction assessment based on cloud model and fuzzy TOPSIS

Appl Intell (Dordr). 2022;52(12):13659-13674. doi: 10.1007/s10489-022-03289-7. Epub 2022 Mar 5.

Authors

Xiuqin Xu^#^{1

2}, Jialiang Xie^#¹, Honghui Wang¹, Mingwei Lin³

Affiliations

¹ College of Science, Jimei University, Xiamen, Fujian 361021 China.
² College of Mathematics and Finance, Putian University, Putian, Fujian 351100 China.
³ College of Computer and Cyber Security, Fujian Normal University, Fuzhou, Fujian 350117 China.

^# Contributed equally.

Abstract

During the COVID-19, colleges organized online education on a massive scale. To make better use of online education in the post-epidemic era, this paper conducts an online education satisfaction survey with four types of colleges and 129,325 students propose a fuzzy TOPSIS (technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution) method based on the cloud model to rank the satisfaction of different colleges. Firstly, based on the characteristics of online education during the COVID-19, we build an evaluation indicator system from four dimensions: technology, instructor, learner and environment including, 10 indicators and 94 sub-indicators. Secondly, the cloud model is used to quantitatively describe the natural language and uncertainty in a large amount of assessment information. The cloud model generator is used for sub-indicators and achieves an effective and flexible conversion between linguistic information and quantitative values. The cloud model of indicators are presented by integrating the corresponding sub-indicators. The weights of indicators are determined by the entropy method based on the cloud model and possibility degree matrix, which eliminates the judgment of decision-makers and has great power for handling practical problems with unknown weight information. Finally, a fuzzy TOPSIS method based on the cloud model is proposed to rank the satisfaction of online education of different colleges. The proposed method is compared with other existing methods to shown its merits. The experimental result is consistent with the proportion of students who accept online education in the post-epidemic era. According to the second questionnaire, as the qualitative evaluation of the cloud model of indicators increases, the qualitative evaluation of satisfaction of different types of colleges will also increase. It indicates that the method proposed in this paper is practical.

Keywords: Cloud model; Fuzzy TOPSIS; Online education; Possibility degree matrix; Satisfaction assessment.