EFL Majors' Attitudes toward Distance Learning via MOOCs: A Comparative Study between Egypt and Saudi Arabia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This research aimed to investigate the attitudes of EFL majors in both Egypt and Saudi Arabia towards distance learning with Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and the underlying factors influencing such attitudes. A mixed method was employed to meet such an end, incorporating a quantitative method of investigation (an attitude questionnaire) and a qualitative one (semi-structured interviews). Quantitively, the participants, who were randomly selected, were 218 EFL majors: 114 from the Faculty of Education for Boys in Cairo, Al-Azhar University in Egypt, and 104 from the College of Science and Humanities, Prince Sattam bin Abdulaziz University- Saudi Arabia. Qualitatively, ten EFL majors (five Egyptian and five Saudi) were purposively selected using Convenience Sampling Technique. Quantitatively, the results revealed that both Egyptian and Saudi Arabian EFL majors exhibited negative attitudes toward distance learning via MOOCs. Qualitatively, some underlying factors interpreting the participants’ attitudes were revealed, i.e., a lack of interactivity and social interaction, limited technological proficiency, language barriers, inadequate feedback, unclear learning objectives, insufficient resources, and concerns about the credibility of MOOCs certificates. The research recommended raising the EFL learners’ awareness about MOOCs, empowering them with systematic support to overcome the technical and linguistic challenges, and fostering collaboration among universities and MOOCs services providers.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".