Factors affecting the success of e-learning processes in Saudi Arabia

Alhabeeb, Abdullah (2018) Factors affecting the success of e-learning processes in Saudi Arabia. Doctoral thesis (PhD), Manchester Metropolitan University.

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Abstract

The recent revolution in information and communication technologies has changed the ways people carry out their day to day activities. Education is one of the fields that has been largely influenced by this revolution. The majority of academic institutions have integrated Electronic Learning either as part or as their full approach to learning delivery. Governments around the world have invested significant resources to integrate the new media in their education systems. Despite these investments and commitment from these institutions, many of the new e-learning systems tend to fail. This has motivated researchers to investigate suitable approaches to overcome these failures. One of the well-known approaches is to identify what so known as Critical Success Factors (CSFs) which are those factors and areas of interests that can potentially have higher impact on the success, or failure, of an e-learning system. This approach has been widely applied areas around the globe and from different perspectives of e-learning systems stakeholders. However, when considering Saudi Arabia as one of the leading countries in Middle East in adopting e-learning base education, very limited research was found in the literature to identify e-learning systems CSFs. This is despite the extensive resources the government invested in encouraging the Saudi institutions to adopt e-learning. In particular, there is a lack of investigative academic research that considers the perspectives of the different e-learning stakeholders in a Saudi context. Motivated by this gap, this thesis has investigated e-learning CSFs from academic staff, experts, and students in King Saud University. Both quantitative and qualitative research methods were employed to carry out this investigation. The results have shown that the three investigated populations consider different factors to be more important than others. For example, academic staff considered students’ characteristics to be the most important while students considered technology infrastructure to be most important. Differences in opinion also emerged between experts and academic staff and experts and students. This thesis document the first study of its kind that carries out this comparative study between the three main e-learning stakeholders groups concerning the identification of e-learning CSFs. Moreover, this study opens several avenues for future research focusing on this subject.