2.1. Online Learning in KSA throughout the Pandemic
COVID-19 lockdowns caused school closures and the cancelling of commercial passenger flights [
2], with tourism industries receiving a harsh hit, contributing to the crippling of the world economy. According to the World Health Organization [
3], more than 37 million COVID-19 cases and 1 million deaths were reported globally from December 2019 to October 2020. Meanwhile, according to [
4], a range of needs have demanded an imperative reform to education in Saudi Arabia and worldwide. The shift towards a new medium of teaching, without the physical presence of the teacher or student, has proven to be a major challenge to this change in educational settings. The physical medium that once gave presence, used by traditional methods to enact authority and control, is becoming obsolete [
5]. According to few researchers [
6], on the concept of online teaching in Saudi Arabia five years before the pandemic, they claim that the classroom environment has shifted to something different, something distant, taking away some control from the teachers and putting it entirely in the hands of the students. It also revealed how Saudi education had been slowly advancing conceptually. This manifested as incompatibility with the medium. It has been proven that teachers were struggling to cope with the changes to online teaching [
6] many years before the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. This mere transition of Saudi classrooms and the teacher’s role remained supplemented with suitable changes that reflected present day societal advancements. The existence of COVID-19 forced a change to unfamiliar grounds [
4]. However, it is not COVID-19 that made these new grounds unfamiliar, but the role itself had been stuck in a loop for generations, neglecting the potential for appropriate changes [
7].
The teacher’s role in online teaching both ‘during COVID-19’ and ‘before the pandemic’ is not merely to present the material, but rather to introduce students to creative methods [
8], where the physical interaction is missing. Hence, the role would need to change from being authoritative to a cooperative, engaging, playful, and fun learning environment. In a cooperative classroom, teachers are part of an interactive environment that focuses on aural and visual stimulation [
8]. Students become creators, shaping their own experiences independently and actively contributing to the shape of the classroom’s environment through visual and aural manipulation, while the teacher would act as a creative guide who enhances their experiences through feedback [
8].
COVID-19 has in fact created a new opportunity for teachers and Saudi education; in particular, they are presented with the opportunity look at education through an array of creative lenses. For instance, ref. [
9] claims that ‘without the outbreak of the pandemic, our schools and universities would have not practiced distance learning in such a fluent way’. The Saudi government has made sure that all its sectors (public and private) need to work together to prevent the spread of COVID-19. According to [
10], the Ministry of Education (MoE) was in a dilemma. However, this type of ‘online’ education has its own culture, ideologies, and mechanisms that might be absent among some people [
11], which may prove to a challenge for parents who are facilitating the learning of their stay-home children. A few researchers claim that online education services began years ago [
4], but the systems were upgraded recently to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic [
12]. Therefore, the Ministry of Education (MoE) has introduced several learning strategies to facilitate the distanced learning process for the students. They applied mechanisms and solutions of distance learning—establishing
Ien TV channels,
Ien on YouTube, the
Ien virtual gate, and other electronic platforms, to accomplish eight million teaching hours, three million items of digital content, and three and half million virtual classrooms [
13].
Many Saudi researchers have praised the work of MoE [
13,
14] for their upscaling of educational strategies during the pandemic. With the beginning of the current academic year, the Ministry of Education was ready to launch the new
Madrasati platform and 23 TV channels, with a specific channel for each level, complementing what was set to be available and beneficial for each student, such as Future Gate, Saudi Virtual School, and the Virtual Kindergarten. The MoE has applied many educational policies to effectively enable students to make the most of these electronic and educational possibilities, assigning morning hours to the intermediate and secondary school students, and the afternoon hours to the elementary school students, in order for parents to follow up with their kids and help them through the process of distanced learning in the evening [
14]. In the same vein, ref. [
13] points out the important fact that the MoE is working closely with other ministries to ensure that each student has the necessary tools and resources to complete the school year via distanced learning. The aim is to broadcast during school time and accommodate students who lack internet access or who have no computers to access the platform [
14]. In fact, the MoE has been doing the best job in dealing with education during the COVID-19 pandemic. Commenting on the ministry’s pledge that students who could not afford computers would not be left behind, Alfaries stated that ‘there are a number of initiatives and collaborations between the ministry and other organizations such as Takaful to help students who cannot afford the basic equipment to access the platform’ [
14]. The MoE was successful in providing 6 outstanding educational platforms—from which 3 million students benefitted—with TV channels achieving 61 million views, the Ien national educational gate having 45 thousand courses and two thousand school digital books, and the
Ien channel on YouTube having 750,000 subscribers, with 5400 recorded lessons and 4000 live hours [
15]. In fact, Barakat [
16] stated that ‘distance learning provided many educational courses as well as recorded lessons which students can accomplish at any time to increase their educational capabilities; and it is not restricted by the time of the class’ [
16]. Moreover, Barakat stated that ‘distance learning does not support the idea of direct communication between the teacher and the student which may result in making the student lazy in his/her learning process because he/she is not under the domination of the teacher and the school administration’ [
16].
Regarding the same point, ‘we may need to explore methods incorporate with online teaching to enhance students’ engagement’ [
17]. The authors of this paper believe that there is still a huge gap between the students and the prospects of remote learning processes. It is also observed that some parents no longer follow the education of their kids these days because they underestimate the importance of remote learning.
During the period of the pandemic, universities and educational institutions proved their effectiveness in the educational process, especially in university education. A study carried out at King Khalid University aimed to assess academic staff satisfaction with suspending traditional teaching and shifting to online education, revealing that 55.9% out of the participants agreed or strongly agreed that the sudden shift to web-based education was done smoothly, and 57.6% agreed or strongly agreed that giving lectures remotely was more flexible than delivering face-to-face lectures [
18]. Moreover, ref. [
15] points out that the MoE is working, in cooperation with expertise international organizations, to conduct an extensive validating assessing study for distanced learning in universities and schools during the period of the pandemic and afterwards. In addition, ref. [
4] conducted a study to explore learners’ levels of engagement in online courses using a designated school platform within the context of Saudi Arabia. A reliable measure was implemented in their study, based on the Student Course Engagement Questionnaire (SCEQ), with a sample of 379 female English as a foreign language (EFL) learners, studying a general English language course. The results revealed a high level of engagement among EFL Saudi learners during the COVID-19 pandemic. Ref. [
19], in their recent study, explored the challenges and support methods for d/Dhh students during their distanced education in Saudi Arabia. A qualitative research study, using semi-structured interviews, was conducted with 37 parents of d/Dhh students to answer research questions. Three themes emerged from the parents’ responses, as follows: (1) the challenges faced by d/Dhh students in distanced education; (2) the specific needs of d/Dhh students in distanced education; and (3) the supports provided to d/Dhh students in distanced education. They concluded that d/Dhh students require various forms of ongoing support from both their families and schools to ensure that they succeed and benefit from their experiences. In her study, ref. [
20] investigated the experiences of English major students at the College of Language and Translation (COLT) in King Saud University, Saudi Arabia, with Emergency Remote Learning and Teaching (ERLT) during the COVID-19 crisis. A total of 150 students participated in the study. An online survey was carried out in the form of questionnaires to elicit their responses. The results showed that laptop computers were the dominant devices students used and preferred. They also revealed that the Zoom platform came first in students’ preferences, followed by Blackboard. Additionally, the findings showed that, although participants used smartphones in their ERL, they did not recommend it, and it came last compared with laptops, tablets, and desktop computers in their order of preference.
2.2. Breakout Groups and Language Learning
The COVID-19 pandemic is forcing many institutions to consider remote, virtual instruction for the safety of employees and students [
21]. Many online language teaching users found the plethora of learning technologies available to be overwhelming [
22]. Helping English language teachers select appropriate technologies is imperative now, more than ever. Many educators are divided about the benefits of online teaching and learning, especially in the current COVID-19 pandemic when such instruction is necessary and often accompanied by insufficient preparation [
23].
Many instructors struggling to get their content online, for the first time ever tasks are carried out under great pressure, and crucial success factors for online teaching, which are being overlooked. Teaching online involves much more than creating a library of learning materials, streaming a lecture, or overloading learners with assignments [
24]. Active learning is a broad term that includes a variety of different methods, which teachers can apply in the classroom [
25]. A general breakdown of active learning will reveal three interrelated subsets, as follows: (a) collaborative learning; (b) cooperative learning; (c) problem-based learning (PBL) [
25]. All of which are methods of instruction that aim to engage students in the learning process [
26].
Meanwhile, breakout groups are employed across a wide range of settings, with most published reports describing their use in conferences [
27], workshops [
28]. However, it was claimed that breakout groups have been widely used on undergraduate programs [
26]. Breakout sessions have therefore been a staple of face-to-face class sessions, and more recently have been employed in both asynchronous and synchronous online courses [
28,
29,
30,
31]. While the use of breakout rooms is widely studied, the intersection between breakout rooms and e-learning is left almost unexplored [
32].
At this point in time, very little has been published regarding the use of breakout groups in a range of educational settings during the COVID-19 pandemic response to the use of breakout groups [
26]. Because of the scarcity of research on breakout rooms (virtual or face-to-face), as described by [
26], it is almost difficult to know how often students are provided with little or no structure to guide collaboration in real breakout room environments at this point. Therefore, this study seeks to fill the gap in the research on the use of breakout groups in Saudi Arabia during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In their study, ref. [
33] used an exploratory case study design to gain insight into instructors’ experiences with web-based synchronous communication using two-way audio and direct messaging. They conducted semi-structured interviews with eight instructors. They concluded that the use of text-based messaging and two-way audio raised issues in relation to the need to divide one’s attention and in promoting student–student interaction during the breakout groups. Breakout groups have become very well known in Zoom software, used by many educators around the world. According to a couple of researchers [
34], ‘educators have utilized a range of online synchronous meeting tools (SMTs) to facilitate student learning’. One of the popular, immersive, and easy-to-use SMTs these days is Zoom, as it includes several features, such as annotation tools, polls, breakout rooms, and video and screen sharing. It has proved that using Zoom in an educational setting can facilitate communicative language learning through the use of authentic language instruction in interactive synchronous classes. However, other researchers have called upon future goals for blended learning, post the COVID-19 pandemic. Conversely, ref. [
35] advocate for a more blended synchronous learning, claiming it has the potential to increase students’ co-presence and improve upon the flexibility and accessibility of course offerings, if it is designed well.
In breakout research, a study has established an ‘interactive, no-prep’ approach, using breakout rooms within a videoconferencing system and requiring prior learner preparation. The authors found that, during the breakout groups, the learners produced perfectly effective study designs to answer the research question(s). Their results revealed that, as learners, they were well engaged in facilitated open discussion, and their learning outcomes were even [
36].