The electronic system and technical programs adopted by Umm Al-Qura University to face the coronavirus pandemic and address its impacts reflected the success of its scientific, educational and administrative system.

The UQU Vice President, Prof. Farid Al-Ghamdi, said the university prepared an integrated plan to confront the coronavirus and reduce its effects on its affiliates, including the male and female students, the academic and staff members and employees, and also its administrative system.

He said the university has achieved more than 36 thousand transactions through its electronic system "Masar" since the beginning of the pandemic, and received about 50 thousand new transactions. "The number of the transactions referred between the university departments reached more that 412 thousand", he explained.

The Supervisor of the Activities of the UQU Vice Presidency for Branches, Dr. Muhammad Al-Hazimi, referred to the success of the plan prepared by the UQU to manage the coronavirus crises and ensure the safety of its affiliates, including the male and female students, and the academic staff members and employees. He added that the university rushed to provide 600 five-star hotel rooms to host the scholarship students in the University City.

He went on to add that the university took the initiative to prepare a 550-bed field hospital at the disposal of the Ministry of Health to receive and treat cases affected with coronavirus. This comes, he noted, from its community role and active participation with the relevant government authorities concerned with the pandemic. These steps were in addition to sterilizing all buildings and classrooms, and cleaning them on a daily basis to ensure everyone's safety.

The Dean of E-Learning and Distance Education, Dr. Khalid Al-Mutairi, said the deanship has set an emergency plan in cooperation with the relevant parties inside the university to manage the e-learning environment, support digital transformation, and provide a specialized training system to achieve the university's strategic goals and ensure the continuation of the educational process. He confirmed that upon the issuance of the decision to change the educational process to become remote, the deanship managed to operate more than 300 academic programs for all the scientific and educational levels.

The Dean of Postgraduate Studies, Dr. Sulaiman Al-Saeed, referred to the success of the deanship in holding defenses for about 800 scientific dissertations in the MA and PhD stages during the coronavirus crisis.

On his part, the Acting Dean of Information Technology, Dr. Atef Al-Hejaili, said that the number of visits to the university web portal during the period of the pandemic exceeded 48 million. Furthermore, more than 291 thousand entries of e-forms were received, 70 thousand e-tickets were answered, and about 14 million awareness and educational texts were sent during the crisis.