Designing and evaluating the effectiveness of the virtual learning environment (VLE) in Saudi Arabia: A review and recommendations

As the ease of the information through the internet increases, distance learning of many courses can now be made through web. Many good web sites programmed from various educational institutions are now available for their students to download lecture notes, study web-based material and attend web-lectures. Some of them even have web-based video lectures or seminars. However, there still exist problems of this way of teaching especially for engineering courses because the laboratory class is fundamental to understand theoretical notes, and has difficulty to be conducted through the internet. In the past, student cannot get any experiment via internet because most of them are only computer simulation rather than real experiment. This is understandable because the web-based hardware implementation is difficult especially in electrical engineering where high frequency, high power operation, and a lot of parameters are to be controlled and recorded and thus are difficult to be connected and controlled by the remote access. However today, with the rapid development of internet tools, electronics, and software this situation can be sorted out. It is primordial and interesting to let students have real practice and doing real experiment at anytime and everywhere with the condition that the internet connection is available. This paper gives an overview of the recent development in the VLE and examines how Web-Based course may be delivered and the way of implementing and designing a particular types of Electrical Engineering Course (theory and laboratory), to assist and advance learning endeavors in electrical engineering programs at Riyadh College of Technology, and finally some recommendations are given.