A Trust Evaluation Model for E-Learning Systems

In recent years, electronic learning (e-learning) has become an increasingly important method in education. Under the environment of Internet of Things, it has been predicted that e-learning systems will grow at an even greater pace. Therefore, it is crucial to find a simple and effective evaluation method to assess user trust in e-learning systems. In this paper, we present an evaluation model based on user trust cloud and user capability for trusted e-learning. A user trust cloud model is proposed to assess a user's subjective trust, and a capability matrix method is introduced to assess a user's objective trust. The proposed model has been implemented for trust management in e-learning systems. Experimental results show that the proposed trust evaluation model is useful and applicable to the user trust assessment in complex e-learning systems. Copyright (C) 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.