ABSTRACT
Purpose: This study aims to explore the effectiveness of the e-learning solutions adopted during the COVID-19 pandemic based on teachers' and students' opinions in Saudi higher education. Design/methodology/approach: This study was performed during the 2021 academic year and involved a survey approach to analyze the effectiveness of Saudi e-learning solutions adopted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Subjective opinions were collected from a sample of 106 teachers and 1,196 students. Findings: The teachers disagreed that online courses provide students with multiple opportunities to track their learning progress with timely feedback, with an arithmetic mean of 2.566 and a standard deviation of 1.627. Moreover, the students disagreed that the use of multimedia facilitates the ease of learning and knowledge extraction from online resources, with an arithmetic mean of 2.443 and a standard deviation of 1.633. Generally, the study implies that today during the COVID-19 pandemic, we need to exploit the power of multimedia tools to bring out knowledge from online learning resources such as images, animations, simulations, video and hypermedia. Based on the results, we need to concentrate on exploiting the power of hypertext systems used in flexible online instruction to enable flexible thinking for online students. Therefore, the e-learning process must favor cognitive flexibility and foster knowledge acquisition for students in the context of e-learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. Originality/value: The findings may be useful in discovering the degree of effectiveness of Saudi e-learning solutions during the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. © 2021, Emerald Publishing Limited.