Saudis with ambition for higher education can now join an external program designed by Imam Muhammad Bin Saud University, said its president Dr. Sulaiman Abdullah Aba Al-Khail on Wednesday while supervising final exams at his university. A new external program, where students can be admitted and register online courses, has been developed at the Imam University. Registered students have to be physically present at either the main campus in Riyadh or other 23 testing centers across the Kingdom to take final exams, Aba Al-Khail told Al-Watan. Students, however, have to meet standard admission requirements applied to Saudi students throughout state universities across the Kingdom. The program, also dubbed distance learning, is tweaked into an online mechanism to ensure live interaction with the instructor, the course, and classmates. The program comes as a new online learning method in the process to be adopted by state universities in the Kingdom. The mechanism of the new Imam e-university would be conducted online from submitting admission application to grade posting, the president said. Launched in a month, the Arabic-English portal university will be a pioneer in Islamic Shariah and sociology majors, he said. The Imam University is hoping to situate itself among top-notch universities in Islamic studies, reflecting the true image of Islam, he said. King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah could be thought as the pioneer in e-learning in the Kingdom. It was the first to start this program last year. Imam University is an international educational and cultural institution formally inaugurated by Royal Decree in 1974.It “thrives on research in contemporary Islamic studies and often has the necessary and adequate knowledge in issues related to the Islamic world,” the mission statement of the University said. Now the Imam University realizes the need to establish a center specialized in contemporary Islamic studies and to promote dialogue among civilizations, the statement continued. __
