Exploring the quality of the higher educational institution website using data mining techniques

Abstract

The website of higher educational institutes is considered a vital communication channel to provide main resources to their stakeholders. It plays an important role in disseminating information about an institute to a variety of visitors at a time. Thus, the quality of an academic website requires special attention to respond to the users’ demands. This study aims to explore the quality of the PSAU website based on data mining techniques. The first step: was collecting opinions about the PSAU website using a survey. After that, data mining processes were used as descriptive and predictive models. The descriptive model was applied to describe and extract the major indicators of website quality. Besides, the predictive model was applied to create models for predicting the website quality level. More than one classification algorithm was used. Naive Bayes and Support Vector Machine have given the best results in all performance indicators, and the achieved accuracy rate for both algorithms was 86% and 84% respectively. The results revealed that the overall quality level of the PSAU website is very good. The usability quality and content quality were very good. The service quality needs more attention. which indicated that the service level is inadequate and needs to be further enhanced. The results of the study should be useful to the deanship of Information Technology at PSAU, and website developers, in redesigning with high quality in terms of its usability, content, and service.