What scientists include among the essential attributes of sustainable agricultural systems can influence the development of agricultural research agendas and how research is done. Current perspectives on sustainability place varying emphasis on environmental and agrarian values and propose different amounts and kinds of change in agricultural production, agricultural science, and rural social institutions. In a delphi study, agricultural scientists at North Central region land-grant universities considered environmental management and development of new farming technologies as essential to a definition of sustainable agriculture, but gave little importance to social or scientific restructuring. With some qualifications, we characterize their view of sustainability as a stewardship perspective that does not include social considerations and explicitly rejects radical social change.
A review and comparison among the different models applied to assess e-learning readiness, the basis for designing a new model for assessing e-learning readiness in Iraqi universities and clarifying the mechanism of the fuzzy delphi method used to prove the validity of the proposed model will be in the next section of the paper, followed by a section, the experts stage for the validation of the proposed model, analyze the data and discuss the results, and in the final section, set the appropriate model for assessing e-learning readiness in Iraq as approved by the experts and validated using the fuzzy delphi method.
This study designs a comprehensive model for assessing e-learning readiness to capture starting point conditions for helping Iraqi universities to increase the capacity to ensure and develop level of readiness to adoption e-learning system. So, the research aims to determining dimensions, factors and measures which affected e-learning readiness in Iraqi universities. In contrast to other studies, the fuzzy delphi method investigated all the criteria in this study. This study sought to answer the following research questions:
The Fuzzy Delphi Method (FDM) introduced more than three decades ago by (Murphy et al., 1998; Murray et al., 1985) in that the FDM combines the standard delphi method with the fuzzy theory (Saffie et al., 2016). The method was developed to eliminate ambiguity from the panel agreements used in the Delphi method and minimize inquiry times. FDM is used to derive accurate and trustworthy statistical conclusions from qualitative data (Bui et al., 2020). Delphi approach relies on group dynamics rather than statistical power to bring experts together in an agreement (Okoli & Pawlowski, 2004). Multiple opinions of researchers about the sample size of experts, in that which stated that the number of responsive experts should be 10 to 50 experts (Jones & Twiss, 1978; Yusof et al., 2022). Gedera (2014) indicated the numbers of selected experts should be 15 to 35 experts while Rowe and Wright (2001) identified 5 to 20 experts as a sample size on the delphi method as well as Okoli and Pawlowski (2004) recommended 10 to 18 experts. In fuzzy delphi method, the choice criteria of experts for an investigation are education level, field of expertise, experience, and the readiness for participation in the respective study field (Benssam et al., 2016; Berliner, 2004; Buckley & Doyle, 2016; Bui et al., 2020; Rahman et al., 2021). The essential steps of the FDM are input preparation, data analysis and final decision. Input preparation comprises collecting data, creating questionnaires, and choosing experts. Three procedures make up data analysis: converting qualitative scale to a fuzzy scale, figuring out the threshold value and agreement % and defuzzification. Based on the findings of the data analysis stage, the final decision is taken (Saffie & Rasmani, 2016). A threshold value of 0.2 or less, an agreement percentage of 75% or more, and a defuzzification value of 0.5 or more are prerequisites in the data analysis. FDM has been applied in some previous studies, employed to screen the e-readiness assessment indicators (Al-araibi et al., 2019; Habibi et al., 2015; Jafari & Montazer, 2008; Jaya et al., 2022; Khalli et al., 2022; Marlina et al., 2022; Masouleh et al., 2014; Sulaiman et al., 2020).
The fuzzy delphi method was employed to assess the dimensions, factors and measures of e-learning readiness, in that the fuzzy delphi method includes two key steps are: design a questionnaire and analyze the data to reach expert agreements. The questionnaire was structured based on previous empirical studies in that included the dimensions, factors and measures that were identified based on the literature review and used a five-point linguistic scale as shown in Table 2. The questionnaire was reviewed by 4 experts to ensure that content validity, wording clarity and structure integrity.
Before the validation process, the proposed e-learning readiness assessment model included three dimensions with (13) factors and (119) measures. Following fuzzy delphi assessment, all the proposed dimensions and factors have validated and approved with identifying the priority of the dimensions, factors and measures while (33) measures in the prototype model did not achieve the assessment requirements, resulting in their removed from the model.