American and Canadian Parents' Perceptions of Virtual Education: A Case Study of K-12 Students Living in Saudi Arabia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This exploratory study investigates how American and Canadian parents living in Saudi Arabia perceive enrolling their children in an online virtual school. This research is relevant to North Americans living and working overseas and how these parents access educational opportunities for their children. North American parents living in Saudi Arabia with children have limited local educational options. If parents decided not to enroll their child in traditional private local international education, alternatives include boarding school, homeschool, or online school. Of the surveyed participants, 68% of parents had enrolled their children in online education or expressed interest in enrolling their children in online education but many lack information and knowledge about online education. A qualitative study analyzed participants in semi-structured interviews. Besides academic satisfaction, the most common reasons for alternative education are the lack of available competitive sports and the arts, including theatre and music. Four themes emerged from the data. Parent satisfaction about their children's education shifts from positive to negative around 8th or 9th grade. Parents are, in general, unwilling to take a risk on an unproven online school. Local private international schools are the focal point of extra-curricular activities and social events, but families lack connections and a supportive environment within the local Saudi Arabian community. Overall, parents do view full-time online education as a viable option for K-12 education; however, perhaps not for their children. Though standalone online classes, within a traditional face-to-face school, was received positively by many families.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".