Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to identify the factors affecting the online education, and then evaluating those factors using the MCDM methodology. This paper will provide some recommendations upon the factors which are critical to be evaluated and analyzed to improve the online education environment. Design/methodology/approach: AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process) given by Satty, is being used in the paper for development of a hierarchical model of factors and ranking the factors. After a comprehensive literature survey and opinions of experts, the critical factors affecting online education were identified. 15 experts from the academic field were approached to fill the pair wise comparison matrix. Findings: The results of the study shows that all the factors are not equally weighted. Security and Risk associated with online platform, financial constraints and trialability and observability of the system are the top three factors among all identified factors.