Teaching and Learning in Survival Mode: Students and Faculty Perceptions of Distance Education during the COVID-19 Lockdown

Maram Meccawy, Zilal Meccawy and Aisha Alsobhi
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Maram Meccawy: Department of Information Systems, Faculty of Computing & Information Technology, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah 21589, Saudi Arabia
Zilal Meccawy: English Language Institute, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah 21589, Saudi Arabia
Aisha Alsobhi: Department of Information Systems, Faculty of Computing & Information Technology, King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah 21589, Saudi Arabia

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 14, 1-23

Abstract: (1) This study demonstrates how a Saudi university has responded to the COVID-19 lockdown in order to examine the success factors and highlight any challenges. The main purpose was to determine the perceptions of students and faculty towards emergency online distance learning from a teaching and learning perspective; (2) A cross-faculty study was conducted: two different self-administered questionnaires were developed for students and faculty, respectively. In addition, data was collected from official reports; (3) The results show that students had a more positive perception of e-Learning despite the difficulties that they may have faced, while faculty results leaned slightly towards a negative perception. However, there was not a definite positive or negative perception, depending on the aspect of teaching that was being evaluated. The study also indicated that faculty and students’ gender had no significant effect on their perceptions. Overall results showed that the university performed well in accordance with three of the five pillars of online learning quality framework in terms of student satisfaction, access and scalability. On the other, improvements are needed to achieve better results for faculty satisfaction and learning effectiveness; (4) The findings present a number of suggestions for increasing satisfaction to improve the online learning experience post COVID-19.

Keywords: COVID-19; distance learning; higher education (HE); e-Learning; student and faculty satisfaction; Saudi Arabia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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