Virtual tours in museums are an ideal solution for those that are not able to visit a museum or those who want to have a small taste of what is presented in the museum before their visit. However, these tours often encounter severe problems while users interact with them. In order to check the status of virtual tours of museums, we present the implementation of an evaluation experiment that uses a combination of two multi-criteria decision making theories, namely the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and the fuzzy technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS). AHP has been used for the estimation of the weights of the heuristics and fuzzy TOPSIS has been used for the evaluation of virtual tours of museums. This paper presents the exact steps that have to be followed in order to implement such an experiment and run an example experiment for virtual tours of Italian museums.
This paper focuses on the usage of a learning management system in an educational institution for higher education in Greece. More specifically, the paper examines the literature on the use of different learning management systems for blended learning in higher education in Greek Universities and Technological Educational Institutions and reviews the advantages and disadvantages. Moreover, the paper describes the usage of the Open eClass platform in a Technological Educational Institution, TEI of Ionian Islands, and the effort to improve the educational material by organizing it and adding video-lectures. The platform has been evaluated by the students of the TEI of Ionian Islands based on six dimensions: namely student, teacher, course, technology, system design, and environmental dimension. The results of this evaluation revealed that Open eClass has been successfully used for blended learning in the TEI of Ionian Islands. Despite the instructors’ initial worries about students’ lack of participation in their courses if their educational material was made available online and especially in video lectures; blended learning did not reduce physical presence of the students in the classroom. Instead it was only used as a supplementary tool that helps students to study further, watch missed lectures, etc.
The evaluation of cultural websites is a complicated procedure that depends on several criteria. The main contribution of this paper is on showing how this process may be implemented. For this reason, different multi-criteria decision-making methods are combined and compared for processing the results of the evaluation. More specifically, the paper provides the criteria for evaluating a website of cultural heritage and presents the application of Analytical Hierarchy Process for estimating the weights of the criteria. Then, it compares two different multi-criteria decision-making models, fuzzy simple additive weighting and fuzzy weighted product model, for being combined with Analytical Hierarchy Process and processing the results of the evaluation. The evaluation involves 29 websites of the conservation labs of the international museums and useful conclusions are extracted about the application of all methods and the combination of Analytical Hierarchy Process with fuzzy simple additive weighting and fuzzy weighted product model.