Dynamic Trust Evaluation of Learning Objects

The existing learning environments, along with the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in higher education, lack the stakeholders (that is, teachers and students) specific trust assessment of learning objects for their selection. This work, therefore, presents a trust model as a solution to uncertainty problem in the selection of learning objects. A user preferred utility computation method is proposed to facilitate the students in decision making about the selection of learning objects. The trust model enables students to select a trustworthy learning object. The formal analysis, based on the Petri net theory, verifies the correctness of the proposed model. The experiment results reflect the proposed learning object trust evaluation model is effective in dynamic user specific trust assessment. The results also indicate the trust evaluation may vary for different users based on their different preference weights.