Metrics development for measuring virtual university social responsibility

Abstract

Online learning systems in general and virtual universities in particular received considerable attention and had an increasing growth through two last decades. However, the acceptance and enough support from stakeholders sounds to be the main challenges of this kind of educational systems. Regarding this issue, the recent study is aimed to propose and validate a methodology for measuring social responsibility of virtual universities, by which higher education systems would be able to evaluate how each virtual university is responsible to its stakeholders and it can provide a useful scale to be used for ranking of this higher education institutions. The factors that comprise university social responsibility are inherently fuzzy and subjective in nature; therefore, in this research we propose to make use of Fuzzy Logic for measuring and quantifying this concept. Additionally in this research, based on the identified factors, we will develop ontological manifestations of social responsibility of virtual universities. © 2012 IEEE.