The world has seen an essential development in higher educational institutions (HEI) with the rapid growth of information and communication technologies (ICT) and of computer software. This growth has created an unprecedented revolution in learning or teaching strategies, precisely in distance education. New concepts have received attention, such as e-learning (EL) or online learning, and blended learning (or hybrid learning), which combines face-to-face learning and EL. Hence, EL has become extensively used in HEI and has, for several years, been seen as one of the most important systems for education improvement in some countries.
1. Introduction
In recent years, the world has seen an essential development in higher educational institutions (HEI) with the rapid growth of information and communication technologies (ICT) and of computer software
[1]. This growth has created an unprecedented revolution in learning or teaching strategies, precisely in distance education. New concepts have received attention, such as e-learning (EL) or online learning, and blended learning (or hybrid learning), which combines face-to-face learning and EL. Hence, EL has become extensively used in HEI and has, for several years, been seen as one of the most important systems for education improvement in some countries. For example, according to
[2], in the USA in 2000–2001, 90% of public HEI for the short cycle and 89% of public HEI for the long cycle offered distance education, with enrolments of 47.84% (1,472,000) and 30.71% (945,000), respectively, out of a total enrolment of 3,077,000. In the UK, EL has been adopted by 95% of all HEI
[3]. The budget for EL in India increased from $2 billion to $5.7 billion between 2016 and 2020
[4].
2. E-Learning Effectiveness
The increase in the adoption of EL in HEI has been followed by higher failure rates of many
e-learning systems (ELS
) [13][5]. This has led researchers to investigate the success and failure of EL
[11,13,14][6][5][7]. Some reasons for failure are content, comfort level with technology, as well as availability of technical support
[15][8], gaps in terms of three dimensions (ethical, evaluation, and management)
[16][9], effective planning of ELS and a lack of experience
[17][10]. On the other side, the key factors for the successful implementation of ELS are the presence of a culture favorable to EL among students
[18][11], computer literacy, availability of appropriate technology, accessibility, and having a good high bandwidth internet connection
[19,20][12][13].
The
e-learning effectiveness (ELE
) concept is complex and multidimensional
[1,2,12,21][1][2][14][15]. Despite this, many studies have attempted to examine the antecedents of ELE
[22,23,24][16][17][18]; they did not introduce a comprehensive model for the antecedents of ELE. However, the results of these studies have not always been consistent
[25,26][19][20] and, therefore, ELE antecedents remain unidentified. Thus,
ourthis research helped in filling this gap by introducing a comprehensive framework for the antecedents of ELE in higher education institutions during the COVID-19 pandemic in the KSA context. This framework has been adopted from different fields of research, such as management information systems, pedagogy, education, and psychology
[27][21]. From this perspective, the systemic approach to EL could help to analyze and explain the effectiveness of EL as a dynamic set of interdependent sub-entities interacting together. Based on an inventory of a considerable number of models of ELSS,
[4] suggests two dimensions to measure the effectiveness of ELS: net benefits (NB) and user satisfaction (US). NB involves the impacts of ELS, such as academic achievement, empowerment, learning enhancement, and time savings. US is the positive or negative responsiveness of a user toward the skills accumulated or knowledge enhancement through ELS.
3. The Key Antecedents of E-Learning Effectiveness
As such, to better understand the adoption of EL, it is important to examine the relevant factors influencing its effectiveness. The factors affecting the effectiveness of EL are several and various because researchers have regarded these factors in terms of student perceptions, pedagogical aspects, EL environment, technological support, societal factors. According to
[28][22], these factors assimilated to challenges are course, characteristics of students or teachers, context (societal, cultural, and organizational), and technology. For other researchers, these factors were, namely, infrastructure, support of the system, e-learning readiness (ELR), learning culture, design system, resistance to change (RTC), and interactivity (INTRVAY)
[21,29,30,31,32][15][23][24][25][26]. However, the problem with this research is related to the large number of variables that had a potential impact on ELE. To deal with this problem,
wit nee
haved to focused on the variables most used by recent research (
Table 1). Based on these 20 studies, it appears that effective ELS depends on the interactions with four variables: ELS, ELR, INTRVAY, and RTC.
Table 1.
Antecedents of ELE.