By Iqbal Tamimi 

No one can argue the benefits of introducing distant learning and its positive effect, but what about its effect on the women of Saudi Arabia?

Introducing e-learning to Saudi educational institutions was the focus of the recent conference hosted by the Saudi National Centre for E-Learning and Distance Learning and King Khalid University. The theme of the conference was “Development and Shareability in E-Learning” that brought together e-learning deans from universities across Saudi Arabia and around the world and leading international experts in education technology who discussed the latest innovations in digital education, and how they can be leveraged to improve the learning outcomes of Saudi students.

According to data from the World Bank and the OECD, illiteracy in Saudi Arabia has fallen to below 4 per cent and more and more school leavers are now entering higher education. Press releases boast about Saudi higher education institutions for moving away from entirely face-to-face delivery, to using digital learning tools, such as e-texts and online learning systems, but what about the effect of distant and e learning on women in Saudi Arabia?

Dr Jeff Borden, Pearson’s Vice President of Instruction and Academic Strategy and Lead at the Centre of Online Learning, who has global experience in designing e-learning programmes for learning institutions, believes that entrenching a culture of e-learning in higher education is critical to the Saudi Government’s goal of achieving a diversified, knowledge based economy.

No one can argue the benefits of introducing distant learning and its positive effect on the economy, but what about its effect on the women of Saudi Arabia?

I am deeply concerned that encouraging more e-learning based education, might alienate women further and deprive them from benefiting from face to face and group educational experiences and skills. Encouraging them to join distant learning will further isolate them in their highly segregated society. All technologies that help keeping women at home, for educational, entertainment and communication purposes, were highly praised and encouraged by the ultra-conservative males in the Saudi society. Many guardians of Saudi women perceive the Internet as a moral, religious and political threat. Although Saudi Arabia has been connected to the Internet since 1994, it has restricted its use to state academics, medical and research institutions until January 1999.

In 2010, Sheikh Saad El-Ghamdi went as far as issuing a fatwa banning women from logging in online without a chaperon sitting at their side.

“Women are similar to other beings, yet they are weak and emotional, which drags them towards what is against God’s rule ... The internet is full with tempting things that will be very hard for the weak woman to avoid ... Thus an escort who is aware of her weak psyche, which is prone to sex and emotion, is to accompany her while being online,” said Sheikh Saad El-Ghamdi in 2010.

As expected there were no Fatwas issued about the ‘weaknesses’, nor such Saudi scholars explained how men manage to immune themselves against ‘on-line-temptations’, or why a woman who happens to have no escort should be deprived of her right to use tools of communication.

E-learning in general has huge advantages but we have to be aware of a fake success image about women’s excellence in education based on the fact that more women are graduating from universities, without experiencing the face to face group education needed badly for real life working environment, or highlighting the percentage that managed to find a job and work after graduation.

I have found through research and investigation, that the gendered public sphere and the segregation policies in Saudi Arabia, has been transferred to the cyber sphere. The deeply embedded nature of gender-based judgements and assumptions permeate Saudi on-line practices. The Internet has not succeeded in achieving equality between both genders in Saudi Arabia, and online interactions are merely a reflection of the real world where men dominate conversations by introducing topics and ignoring others introduced by women.

Over encouraging e-learning in Saudi Arabia will help camouflage a deep rooted problem. Saudi guardians favour women staying home and do everything from home, from education to establishing home based businesses. This will hardly lead to women’s financial independence or help them develop their businesses because they will miss on lots of activities and practicing their public and face to face negotiation skills.

Encouraging wide scale e-learning will deprive female students from attending activities at educational institutions where they develop important skills such as attention, memory, language and motor skills. Students who miss on such training might have trouble listening and attending in conversations, be unable to inhibit the impulse to talk or say things at inappropriate times or have poor negotiating skills and may have difficulty keeping up with the pace of a conversation, especially when there is a group of people are talking and a great deal of information to be considered.

From my own experience in journalism, introducing distant communication tools such as the internet had some negative effects on Saudi women journalists. It has enforced segregation and encouraged communication by internet, leaning heavily on copy and paste procedures instead of proper field research. Producing reports from home only, using Internet, can hardly be considered adequate for news gathering.

Hedaya Darweesh is the first Saudi woman journalist to switch from print to online journalism. She established HidayaNet in 2004 as a personal website, but transformed it later into a daily online news website focusing on Saudi women’s activities. Later on she changed the title of her website that used to bare her name to "Kolalwatan" which translates ‘The entire Homeland’. In her next step she deleted her name altogether from the editorial information online. The changes she made on her career reflect submission to the pressures of the society and the media market.  Media projects that bear women’s names in Saudi Arabia have little chance of success compared to websites that bare classic masculine titles. Darweesh’s shifting from being an employee at a local newspaper to becoming working from home, meant financial losses. She could not benefit from revenues of advertisements for pure social reasons. Awitching to on-line journalism made her dependant on her husband’s financial support, besides having to resort in many cases to the cut and paste procedures and publishing the ready packed press releases circulated by PR companies instead of publishing exclusive reports from the field because she could not afford the cost of hiring professional journalists or sale representatives. Her project was perceived as a time filling hobby than a job that can be relied on for making a living.

Women’s absence from some journalistic areas in mainstream media, such as advertising and creative skills, has an impact on the society. In Saudi Arabia Hana Hijjar is the only woman cartoonist working in this field, competing with 38 men cartoonists. Making Saudi women’s perspective almost absent in this field as is the case in other fields of media. The majority of caricatures published in Saudi press are male dominated that reflect an unfair image of Saudi women as time wasters, overweight, opportunists, ugly, ignorant and underachievers. You can see some examples published on the caricature section of Journomania magazine.

Unfortunately, although e or distant learning might be seen by the majority as a democratising media tool, I can’t see it but as a tool that will have a negative effect on Saudi women; encouraging further segregation and depriving women of learning many skills that can’t be achieved by distant learning.

Iqbal Tamimi is the Director of Arab Women Media Watch Centre in UK and a campaigner for ethical journalism and women’s rights