The Reality of Distance Education in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Light of the Analysis of the Twitter Big Data

Abstract

This study aimed to describe the reality of emergency distance education in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia from the point of view of the users of the hashtag #distance_education since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. It seeks to identify the factors affecting its reality, and the participants’ feelings towards it through using the descriptive research method in a case study. It covers the hashtag #distance_education on Twitter since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. It ends in the first semester of the 2020–2021 academic year. This was done by retrieving the tweets in #distance_education hashtag in Twitter and analyzing them as documents by using Python as a programming language. The results show that during the pandemic, tweets in the #distance_education hashtag on Twitter focused on the continuity of education, taking into account social responsibility as well as rehabilitation and technological realization. It also shows the forefront of the social factor in the influence, followed by the technological factor, then the health factor, and finally the economic factor. It concluded that the neutral opinion prevailed in that periods and categories of the study.