Abstract—This paper aims to understand the transition from
purely classroom teaching to online teaching method during the
COVID-19 pandemic at the International Indian School Jubail
in Saudi Arabia. As the teachers were familiar only with the
traditional face-to-face classroom teaching style since 1987, the
study addresses this transition, the benefits and disadvantages
of online instruction, their suggestions, opinions, and their level
of preparedness for an alternate teaching method in the future
when the pandemic ends. The survey instrument, a
self-designed Google Forms questionnaire, was administered
online due to the pandemic restrictions from 23 July to 30 July
2020 and data consisting of 299 participants was gathered. The
study was descriptive in nature and qualitative data analysis
revealed that while teachers trust the traditional classroom
teaching method, they began to perceive the distinct benefits of
online teaching. Majority of the respondents showed a high
level of comfort after four months of online teaching. One
fascinating finding of this study was that the respondents
having more years of teaching experience needed lesser effort
though they found themselves less comfortable with online
teaching, probably because they were more satisfied with their
prior experience of classroom teaching. Nonetheless, an
interesting finding showed that most respondents demonstrated
a positive and favourable attitude towards blended teaching
and supported technology-enhanced teaching practices. A good
proportion of these respondents recommend blended teaching
as a future teaching method and are ready to adopt it after the
new normal is resumed. The experience of online teaching has
given clarity to teachers about usage of a variety of effective
online teaching tools to support their new teaching
environments and an insight into the future possibilities of
adopting online education.
Index Terms—Blended teaching, COVID-19 pandemic,
online teaching, Saudi Arabia, school education.
Ashma Shamail is with the Department of English, College of Science &
Humanities, Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University, Saudi Arabia (e-mail:
asshaik@iau.edu.sa).
Manjusha Chitale is with International Indian School, Saudi Arabia
(e-mail: manjushachitale@yahoo.com).
Cite: Ashma Shamail and Manjusha Chitale, "Transition to Online Teaching during the COVID-19 Pandemic in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia — A Study," International Journal of Information and Education Technology vol. 12, no. 8, pp. 794-801, 2022.
Copyright © 2022 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).