For many students it was their first experience of taking courses online, the study . . taking engineering, pharmacy or business courses in English, or law, education or communication in Arabic. The performance of students in the first two terms of the 2019-2020 academic year, when courses moved online, was analysed. With face-to-face teaching, 38 per cent of students achieved a semester grade point average between 3.0 and 4.0, whereas with distance learning, the figure was 49 per cent. In their paper, published in the International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning , the researchers said the improved performance may be the result of “the use of innovative technologies and digital resources in distance learning”.