Pathology

Hypertext

Sample (material)

Disease

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)

Mathematics

Multimedia

Distance education

Infectious disease (medical specialty)

Biology

Pandemic

Creativity

Statistics

The Internet

World Wide Web

Mathematics education

Instructional design

Paleontology

Psychology

Exploit

Chemistry

Originality

E learning

Context (archaeology)

Computer science

Flexibility (engineering)

Computer security

Chromatography

Medicine

Social psychology

Online Information Review

Purpose This study aims to explore the effectiveness of the e-learning solutions adopted during the COVID-19 pandemic based on teachers' and students' opinions in Saudi higher education. Design/methodology/approach This study was performed during the 2021 academic year and involved a survey approach to analyze the effectiveness of Saudi e-learning solutions adopted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Subjective opinions were collected from a sample of 106 teachers and 1,196 students. Findings The teachers disagreed that online courses provide students with multiple opportunities to track their learning progress with timely feedback, with an arithmetic mean of 2.566 and a standard deviation of 1.627. Moreover, the students disagreed that the use of multimedia facilitates the ease of learning and knowledge extraction from online resources, with an arithmetic mean of 2.443 and a standard deviation of 1.633. Generally, the study implies that today during the COVID-19 pandemic, we need to exploit the power of multimedia tools to bring out knowledge from online learning resources such as images, animations, simulations, video and hypermedia. Based on the results, we need to concentrate on exploiting the power of hypertext systems used in flexible online instruction to enable flexible thinking for online students. Therefore, the e-learning process must favor cognitive flexibility and foster knowledge acquisition for students in the context of e-learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. Originality/value The findings may be useful in discovering the degree of effectiveness of Saudi e-learning solutions during the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Diagnosis of the effectiveness of the e-learning solutions adopted in Saudi higher education during the COVID-19 pandemic