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Unexpected situations change the world rapidly, requiring critical thinking, collaboration, and creativity to confort and adjust to these changes and maintain the continuity of life's activities. The COVID-19 Pandemic is one of those unexpected situations that severely constrained people's behavior worldwide (Hale et al., 2020). In March 2020, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic brought learning to a screeching halt worldwide, causing the most severe international education disruption in history (Algaraady & Mahyoob, 2022; Mahyoob et al., 2022). According to the latest report from the OECD's International Student Assessment Program (PISA) (OECD, 2020), this crisis hits when most education systems are not ready for the world of digital learning.
This pandemic obliged the whole world to switch to online education abruptly to halt the virus outbreak. This learning modality early appeared in Great Britain in the 60s, where the online teaching process was conducted using radio and television. At that time, the “National Council for Distance Education” was established, and it was converted later in 1982 to the “International Council for Distance Education,” pursuing financial support from the International Development Bank (Atallah & Bou Melhem, 2020). Due to the rapid development in technology, this modality has taken its rightful spot in the instructional process.
Over time many universities embraced this learning modality and started offering online classes in different majors and degrees. They assembled all the required electronic resources such as eBooks, journals, videos, recorded/live lectures, discussion, quizzes, sessions, and forums (Guthrie et al., 2020).
Now, despite endorsing online learning, assessing students is one of the many challenges that obstruct the success of online learning. Moreover, the students can cheat in online exams easily. Fortunately, some institutions achieved excellent online learning by providing their students with the content and the interaction required for a better learning environment and guaranteeing that cheating is impossible.
Due to the pandemic, online learning emerged as a practical option and compulsory mode to maintain the education process in public, private, and international schools, institutes, and universities, whereby teaching is performed remotely and on digital platforms.
Each country has devised its way of adopting an educational mechanism that matches its capabilities and the coronavirus outbreak. Due to the emergent demand, many countries launched online learning platforms or channels to manage the educational process. Those platforms offer free access to their services, such as the E-learning portal in Kuwait, Educational lessons broadcasted live on TV in Yemen, CNTE - Watania Educative in Tunisia, ECE Platform/ Syrian Educational Platform in Syria, Iraq educational platform/ Newton in Iraq, Ien National e-portal and Madrassati platform in KSA, and many others.
In KSA, the Ministry of Education immediately transformed from actual in-person learning to distance learning after the suspension. And to maintain the instructional process without disruption, it has established several instructional alternatives to guarantee the continuity of the learning process remotely through the Madrasati platform. In addition to the Madrasati platform, the Ministry has launched a virtual kindergarten application and prepared 23 educational channels, “Ien channels,” to broadcast lessons according to the study schedule.
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) reported that more than 1.5 billion students and youth across the globe representing 91percent of the world's school population, are or have been affected by school and university closures due to the unprecedented disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic1. They become virtual-school learners as they shelter in their homes. In contrast, parents and family members have engaged in new roles.