Perceptions of University Faculty of Saudi Arabia towards Online Classes Conducted During the Covid-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The study aims to find out the perceptions of university faculty who taught the courses online during the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020. The purpose is to highlight the issues of students and faculty involved in the new context of teaching and learning and prepare them to face the technical and academic challenges. A questionnaire is circulated among the faculty of universities in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The majority of the university faculty who taught the courses online from the middle of the semester are satisfied with their teaching. However, they prefer face-to-face instruction to online instruction. A few of them are in favor of blended learning. The faculty accepts technical and academic issues and issues related to the trust and the value of online instruction. The study is helpful for all the educational institutions, teachers, and students across the world to understand how to conduct online education during crises and calamities to eradicate the technical and academic problems present in the online mode of teaching, and to update and accept the changing trends and developments in the field of education. The article is original because it studies the perceptions of the regular university faculty who taught half of the course face-to-face and the other half online. The novelty lies in finding out how they participated in online teaching during the lockdown period of the Covid-19 pandemic.