Abstract
Academic institutions, organizations, as well as government agencies are increasingly using the Internet and information technologies to provide the targeted beneficiaries with informational content and educational resources. Learning management systems (LMS) are some of the frequently used software for this purpose. Adopting such systems in higher education has become a major focus of interest and several educational institutions are heavily investing in their development and deployment. Selecting the most appropriate LMS is a strategic decision to gain stakeholder's traction and to enable decision makers to avoid bad choices, make predictions and accordingly optimize LMS investment. With the growth of LMS market and the increasing number of LMS features, an effective LMS evaluation method is needed to deal with this diversity and help decision makers to select the most appropriate one. Indeed, selecting the most appropriate LMS can be considered as a Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) problem with the objective to rank a set of LMS and select the best system that fits educational system stakeholder requirements and promote learning at the institution. In this paper, three different LMS categories are considered (i.e.; proprietary, open source and web-based LMS) with a set of criteria inspired from ISO 9126 model for selecting systems quality characteristics and sub-characteristics.