Attitudes of Undergraduate Students toward E-learning in Arabic Thesis

Attitudes of Undergraduate Students toward E-learning in Arabic Language Courses - Thesis Example The success of the program is then determined by this enthusiasm. University students at the King Khalid University in Saudi Arabia have been enlisted on this e-learning program with the same promise of a better future with highly advanced technology. E-learning is a process in which technology such as computers and internet-based resources are utilized to learn in an informal environment away from a formal instruction-oriented classroom Undergraduate university students, who form a sizeable population at tertiary level educational institutions in any given country at a time, have, of late, been called upon to undertake e-learning as a more viable practical alternative to other methods of study. E-learning and e-teaching environments necessarily differ in contextual and atmospheric dimensions and their definitional parameters have been stretched beyond the simple computer mediated proposition. Asynchronous e-learning and e-teaching have become the order of the day in most informal environments where teachers are far removed, sometimes thousands of miles, from the learner. Yet again, there is a distinction between pedagogy-driven e-learning and technology-driven e-learning. A considerable amount of literature has been compiled on the attitudinal perspectives of the university student population in the English speaking world, but nevertheless the same cannot be said about the non-English speaking countries like Saudi Arabia, where university undergraduates have displayed a remarkable paradigm shift in attitude to embrace e-learning as a radical alternative to formal instructional method of learning. This paucity of literature on the subject has weighed more on my effort to produce a comprehensive study on the hitherto less explored phenomenon of e-learning by undergraduate Arabic language students in the King Khalid University in Saudi Arabia. The cognitive construct is a plausible parameter employed by psychological theory to study characteristically peculiar patterns of behavior that are not otherwise amenable to interpretation or analysis.