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Purpose In the last years, the use of free-online instructional videos has gained popularity among educators and students. Its success is mainly based on the provision of fast and inexpensive access to educational contents which can be consulted at the own convenience of students, all over the world. Free-online platforms as YouTube offer access to more than ten million instructional videos. The purpose of this paper is to assess and rank the educational quality of free-online instructional videos from a multidimensional perspective. Design/methodology/approach In this paper, the authors propose a MCDM approach based on a compromise ranking method, VIKOR. The approach integrates a normalization process which is especially suitable for situations where the nature of the different decision-making criteria is such that it does not allow homogeneous aggregation. Findings With the proposed normalization approach, the initial valuations of the alternatives with respect to the criteria are transformed in order to reflect their similarity with a given reference point (ideal solution). The normalized data are then integrated in a VIKOR-based framework in order to obtain those mathematical videos closer to the ideal video from the instructors’ perspective. Originality/value The ranking of instructional videos based on their quality from an educational multidimensional perspective is a good example of a real decision-making problem where the nature of the criteria, qualitative and quantitative, implies heterogeneous data. The proposed IS-VIKOR approach overcomes some of the problems inherent to this real decision-making problem.

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