The COVID-19 pandemic affected all aspects of human life, with significant impacts on education, as higher education institutions across the world were forced to make rapid transition to a fully online education format with no time to prepare. This qualitative study applied the narrative approach to examine the stories of six university instructors regarding their experiences with promoting student engagement during the COVID-19 emergency remote teaching. The study findings present the instructors' feelings during the transition to distance education, the challenges they faced, and their efforts to promote their students' engagement by using various strategies and assessments and by providing the students with emotional support. The findings also present the effect of local culture and millennial generation student status on students' engagement.

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Student interaction is a pivotal element in any educational environment. Accordingly, employing technologies to increase these educational interactions has attracted both instructors’ and students’ attention. This qualitative paper investigated the means of employing Telegram, a social network site (SNS), to increase students’ educational interactions and explore their perceptions of using it as an interactional medium in a university course. A thematic analysis was applied to assess data collected from the posts of 77 university students in three Telegram groups created for this course and the students’ reflection papers required at the end of the course. This study’s findings identified several instructional activities that can be employed on Telegram to enhance students’ interactions, as well as presented how students interact with their instructor and each other on Telegram. The findings also highlighted the students’ perceptions of Telegram as a technology to enhance their course interactions, including the advantages and disadvantages of using Telegram in this course. Implications of this study can allow university instructors and policymakers to reconsider their teaching methods and even encourage using Telegram or similar SNSs to aid students’ learning.

The health, social, and economic challenges we have faced have contributed to the improvement of educational styles and learning environments. Globally, the reflections of COVID-19 have contributed to the re-perception of the future of education and the anticipation of new scenarios. This qualitative study aims to deeply examine and understand the repercussions of distance education—specifically K–12 education (kindergarten to twelfth grade) during the pandemic in Saudi Arabia—and, with the findings, build anticipated scenarios for future post-pandemic digital education. This study adopts an ethnographic approach to investigate the cultural perspectives of those whose education was and has been greatly affected by this transition. Qualitative large-scale data (comprising 36 observations, 387 individual interviews, and 177 focus groups) were collected for 7 months in 2021 from 600 participants, all of whom were connecting in various ways to the K–12 educational system and varied by gender, age, profession, and academic degree. The findings were categorized into four themes: (1) educational outcomes, (2) teaching landscape, (3) parental involvement, and (4) societal and life aspects. The findings are discussed in a style that presents the most crucial aspects that we must consider for anticipated scenarios of future post-pandemic education. Each presents critical implications for teachers, students, parents, researchers, and educational authorities.

Covid-19 has affected the everyday educational lives of students, teachers, administrators, and parents. Parents who are living in low-income and disadvantaged communities are probably more likely than others to have been affected by the pandemic in relation to their children’s distance learning. This study focused on the perceptions, predictions, and suggestions of female breadwinner parents from low-income families regarding their children’s distance learning. Data were collected from 12 mothers who participated in a three-stage focus group study. The data from the focus group discussions were thematically analyzed into three categories: (1) financial issues, (2) social and cultural issues, and (3) educational issues. Additionally, the findings presented the breadwinners’ general and technological reasons for their predictions for enhancing education in the future if schools return to face-to-face learning or pursue a blended learning approach. The breadwinners suggested three approaches to teaching and learning for the following academic year. The findings of this study may be useful in the development of educational policies and training programs to provide essential social and technological support to low-income families to address their needs in the online learning environment and to improve digital equity for low-income families who are likely to be educationally disadvantaged.

Employing social network sites (SNSs) for academic purposes has been investigated in the literature; however, there is not enough scientific knowledge about university instructors’ behavioral perceptions and values that drive their academic use of SNSs. Therefore, a systematic cognitive framework, regarding SNSs academic usage, is beneficial to understand these behavioral perceptions. This research utilizes the means–end chain (MEC) analysis approach to investigate university instructors’ cognitive structure toward the academic use of SNSs. It identifies important requirements for the effective academic use of SNSs by recognizing the relationship between the critical features of SNSs and instructors’ perceived values derived from these features. The findings show that seven significant features of SNSs form 45 MECs that appear to be the most useful features used by university instructors for academic purposes. These seven features were found to be cognitively associated with 10 positive benefits, which are crucial to the fulfillment of nine of the instructors’ personal values. Of the seven features, following others and being a group member were used most frequently by instructors in their academic practices. These two features were of significant value for the instructors to achieve a sense of accomplishment. The findings have practical implications for instructors and educational institution policy makers to enhance the effectiveness of SNSs use in academic settings.

This study explored the effect of parental involvement in K-12 distance learning activities on their perceived technostress and behaviours of support toward their children’s learning in Saudi Arabia. Partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was used to analyse the data. Applying the person-technology (P-T) fit model, this study proposed a model comprising five factors to answer the research questions. The five factors were parental involvement, parents’ technostress, parents’ self-efficacy, school support and behaviours of support. Analysis of 651 parent responses showed an insignificant relationship between parental involvement in distance learning activities and parents’ technostress. However, there was a significant and positive relationship between parental involvement and parents’ behaviours of support toward their children’s learning. The results also indicated that when parents’ technostress increases, their supportive behaviours rise accordingly. The level of technostress among parents in this study was found to reduce with an increase in both parents’ self-efficacy levels and the level of school support provided by administration and teachers to parents in distance learning environments. The findings of our study suggested several important implications that contribute to providing more effective and successful distance education and supporting the future of post-pandemic digital education in Saudi Arabia.

As an effect of the digital transformation encountered by higher education institutions in the post-pandemic phase, the current study aims to inspect the factors affecting the actual use of mobile learning among higher education students. A novel hybrid model based on the information system success and technology acceptance models was proposed and tested. The study included 400 undergraduate and postgraduate students from four Saudi universities who responded to a questionnaire consisting of two parts and seven dimensions, with a total of 26 items. For the analysis, a quantitative approach was applied using structural equation modeling. The results displayed that information quality had no impact on the actual use of mobile learning among higher education students. In contrast, other quality factors (system quality, service quality, and satisfaction) and perceived factors (perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use) had a positive effect. Accordingly, this study proposed an integrated framework to assist decision makers at higher education institutions in scaffolding students to develop their educational performance by depending on mobile applications comprising high-quality factors that address their real needs. This would also enable higher education institutions to enhance their digital transformation experience, thus contributing to achieving positive learning sustainability after the pandemic.