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The term IoT technology is associated with many fields, including scientific, commercial, industrial, health, transportation and other fields, which became a necessity of daily life across all segments of society. Artificial intelligence, the Internet of things, data science and big data are among the most prominent fields of technologies in the modern era of e-knowledge, which are increasingly being relied on in many areas of our life. This research is considered very special and urgent affecting around 20% of the humanities, i.e., Muslim people, whom try to be selected to perform Islamic rituals every year. Given this importance of applying and adapting technologies to serve Hajj and Umrah performers, it is necessary to conduct an analytical study for the technologies and their applications that have been applied in the Hajj and Umrah system. The surveyed studies have been classified, according to their targeted services (focus area), into four main branches, including studies of the two holy mosques and the holy sites, studies of the pre-arrival visitors, housing and services studies, and transportation and crowd management studies. The classified studies were analyzed according to research field, research instrument, statistical method, nature of statistical data, data collection tools, and research citations. The paper outcome opens novel research practical directions selected based on holistic overview of the current technologies analytical survey, which is essential to be considered to improve Hajj and Umrah services coping with today’s technology, in addition to discussing other open issues that need further deep research.

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In recent years, and also due to the COVID-19 pandemic, education institutions worldwide have changed their education paradigm from a traditional to an online system. These institutions have rapidly accomplished their educational programs and activities by supporting various web applications, allowing the completion of the education process remotely. This motivated us to investigate the general perceptions of the faculty members who are teaching different courses for undergraduate students using the distance education system. The proposed technique is based on the use of advanced analysis methods to test the hypothesis of instructors' perceptions of online teaching effectiveness, compared with traditional teaching, will not be affected by the following eight factors, including gender, academic major, age, academic degree, country of teaching, teaching experience in traditional classes, teaching experience in virtual classes (VCs), and whether or not the department/ faculty provided e-learning courses before the COVID-19 pandemic. A total of 187 lecturers from 71 departments in 24 educational institutions located in 11 countries participated in this research. Results indicate that the perceptions of instructors regarding the online teaching system generally do not change based on the studied factors. Furthermore, the quantitative analyses illustrate that no significant differences exist in all dimension scales in terms of gender, major specification, age, country of teaching, and virtual experience. Significant differences are found in the dimension scale of distance education effectiveness in terms of academic degree and the educator status in terms of supporting VCs and traditional experience dimension scales. Additionally, the study provides various recommendations, including that the departments should encourage instructors to positively adapt with online teaching by developing the required skills and knowledge. Moreover, departments and institutions should support the teaching staff with specialized education tools. In addition, instructors should strive to decrease the communication and interaction gap between distance education and traditional in-class teaching.