The State of Distance Education in Saudi Arabia

In this exclusive report, Hend Suliman Al-Khalifa of King Saud University, Riyadh, explains how Saudi Arabia has begun adopting distance education as part of its educational and development strategies. Saudi Arabia has been slower than many nations to move into distance education. Bachelor degree programs have only been offered through traditional universities' distance education programs for about a decade, and policies for single-mode, distance, and virtual tertiary institutions are still under development for approval by the Ministry of Higher Education. Some public universities, such as King Abdulaziz University and Al-Imam Mohammad ibn Saud Islamic University, are dual-mode, while single-mode distance education is offered by the Arab Open University. Distance education is primarily applied where gender segregation is required in tertiary education, where male lecturers are only authorized to teach female students by means of closed-circuit television, one-way video and two-way audio and broadcast.