Credibility Evaluation of Online Distance Education Websites

Web credibility is becoming a significant factor in increasing user satisfaction, trust, and loyalty. Web credibility is particularly important for people who cannot visit an institution for one reason or other and mostly depend on the website, such as online distance education students. Accordingly, universities and educational websites need to determine the types of credibility problems they have on their websites. However, far too little attention has been paid to providing detailed information regarding the types of specific credibility problems that could be found on university websites in general, and specifically, in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). The aim of this paper is to study and analyze the credibility of university websites that offer distance education courses in the KSA. A total of 12 universities in Saudi Arabia were considered, which include 11 affiliated and one private university. The analysis of the data represents the level of credibility of distance education websites. Results reveal that in Saudi Arabia, distance education websites are reliable, but violate basic credibility guidelines.

@article{Al-Omar2016,
  title     = {Credibility Evaluation of Online Distance Education Websites},
  journal   = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
  volume    = {7},
  number    = {12},
  year      = {2016},
  publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
  author    = {Khalid Al-Omar},
  doi       = {10.14569/IJACSA.2016.071246},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2016.071246}
}