E-Learning Was Supposed to Make Education More Accessible. For a Lot of Students, It Did the Opposite.

A study co-authored by an Effat University researcher finds that the barriers to effective online education are real, specific, and different for students and teachers – and that solving them will require more than better technology.

Online education carries a particular promise: that learning can happen anywhere, for anyone, regardless of geography or circumstance. Remove the physical classroom and you remove a whole set of constraints – the commute, the fixed schedule, the requirement to be in a specific place at a specific time. In theory, e-learning is more accessible than traditional education. In practice, for a significant portion of the students and teachers who lived through its sudden mandatory implementation during the COVID-19 pandemic, it was not.

A study co-authored by a researcher at in Jeddah examines what happened when online education stopped being a choice and became a requirement – and what the experience revealed about who benefits from it and who gets left behind. The research, conducted at the Instituto Politécnico Nacional in Mexico during the lockdown period, surveyed approximately four-fifths students and one-fifth professors across 29 questions on a five-point scale. Its findings are specific, its recommendations are actionable, and its central argument is one that anyone involved in designing or delivering online education should be paying attention to.

The Problem Is Not the Same on Both Sides of the Screen

The study’s most important finding is also its most practically useful one. Students and teachers both experience significant barriers to effective e-learning – but those barriers are not the same, which means that addressing them requires different interventions targeted at different problems.

For students, the dominant source of dissatisfaction was a feeling of insufficient computer skills. This is worth pausing on, because it cuts against a stereotype that gets repeated without much scrutiny. The assumption that younger generations are inherently comfortable with technology – and therefore with e-learning – does not hold when it is tested against data. Familiarity with social media or smartphones does not automatically translate into confidence with learning management systems, online seminar formats, or the specific technical demands that e-learning generates. For students who lacked that confidence, the effect was not limited to occasional technical frustration. It shaped the entire quality of their learning experience – producing anxiety about participation, disengagement from content, and a kind of boredom that is less about the subject matter than about feeling permanently behind.

For professors, the determining factor was institutional. Teacher satisfaction with e-learning was most closely tied to the level of support their university provided for the online teaching process – not to their personal technical ability. That support breaks down into specific, concrete things: clear instructions and defined expectations for what online teaching should look like, a long-term strategic approach rather than improvised responses to immediate pressures, and access to specialised software where general tools are not fit for the purpose. Where universities had invested in these things, professors reported higher satisfaction. Where they had not, professors struggled – and the platform they were using made very little difference.

The Data Behind the Experience

The survey produced a set of findings that are worth laying out directly. Zoom was used by 95% of all respondents, a level of dominance that reflects both its accessibility and the absence of meaningful institutional guidance toward alternatives. Around a quarter of all respondents reported being unhappy with their e-learning tools. Across the board, teachers reported higher overall satisfaction than students. And a low sense of community was one of the strongest predictors of student dissatisfaction – the social environment of the physical classroom, it turns out, is not a peripheral feature of education but something that students notice its absence acutely when it is gone.

The study did not reach a negative overall verdict on e-learning. More than half of respondents agreed that technology integration in education can be beneficial, particularly when active learning strategies are part of the design from the start. The issue is not that online education cannot work. It is that it currently does not work equally for everyone – and that the people for whom it works least well are often those with the least institutional and technical support to fall back on.

Fixing the Right Things

The study’s recommendations are directed at the level where meaningful change can actually happen – institutions and policymakers – rather than at individual students and teachers navigating the system they have been given.

Addressing the digital skills gap between students is identified as a foundational priority. When students begin an online course with unequal confidence in the platforms that course depends on, that inequality produces unequal learning outcomes – a form of disparity that is not inherent to online education but is a predictable result of insufficient investment in preparation. Building digital competence, expanding internet access, and improving ICT infrastructure are the baseline conditions that make everything else possible. Ensuring that marginalised and underserved students are not systematically disadvantaged by starting further behind is a policy obligation, not a secondary consideration.

University e-learning policy also needs to be rebuilt with more ambition and more specificity. Long-term strategies rather than reactive decisions, better digital resources, and hybrid learning models that maintain access for students who cannot always rely on stable technology at home are all identified as priorities. These are not abstract goals – they are the specific institutional choices that determine whether online education fulfils its promise of accessibility or quietly reproduces the inequalities it was supposed to reduce.

Two directions for future research are also flagged. The first concerns community: whether more sophisticated digital collaborative environments could address the persistent sense of isolation that students report in virtual classrooms. No current platform has fully solved this, and it is a problem worth taking seriously given how consistently it shows up as a driver of dissatisfaction. The second is contingency planning – what institutions should do when the technology underpinning their online education becomes unavailable during a crisis. The pandemic was a demonstration that this is not an unlikely scenario. Building offline recovery systems and educational continuity strategies while conditions are stable is exactly the kind of preparation that tends to be skipped until it is too late.