Questions/Answers

The Open Educational Content Program is a Saudi National program led by the National Center for e-Learning (NCeL), that aims in enriching the educational content to support education and provides open access to information and knowledge to the knowledge society in partnership with Saudi educational institutions, universities, public and private sectors, and international organizations. This program seeks to find a sustainable path to partnership in design, improvement, maintenance and enhancing the quality of the digital educational content and it will contribute in providing more educational opportunities for those who speak the Arabic language. This is achieved through partnerships with leading international and Arabic institutions in building a digital repository, and localizations of the OER and building high-quality Arabic educational content. Program Objectives: Contributing to the quality of lifelong education. Enhancing the quality and accessibility of teaching and learning resources. Build capacity of participants in developing sector-wide OER policies. Strengthen the coordination in design, development and quality assurance of OER. Establish the best open educational practices, products and outstanding processes through self-evaluation and peer review. Encourage researchers and developers to conduct studies and propose guidelines and solutions to enhance the OER system.

The SHMS platform https://shms.sa, one of the several initiatives of the National Open Educational Content program facilitates primarily in promoting integrated mechanisms for sustainable development in addition delivering inclusive and equitable services for all and digital transformation in the public sector. Over 50 plus institutions both Public and Higher education institutions in Saudi Arabia have contributed their efforts in creating over 370000 quality OER among which 95% of these resources are in Arabic, thus ensuring sustainability and efficiency in creating high-quality OER in Arabic. This coordinated effort ensures reduction in duplication of effort in creating e-content for education. This digital platform ensures accessibility and equity for quality OER for all.

Our program contributes to the SDG 4, by ensuring, Access : Ensure all Saudi citizens, in every sector of society, have universal, accessible, free, and legal access to effective open education resources and learning opportunities. Quality :Saudi teachers and learners have access to, use, create and iteratively improve quality OER. Efficiency: Ensure all government funded education resources are openly licensed, and efficient utilization of other government provided education resources, services and infrastructure. Sharing: Support collaboration and engagement of communities of educators and learners around OER to cultivate a culture of openness and sharing in education.

The primary benefit of OER is reducing the cost of education and providing open access to information and knowledge. The amount invested by educational institutions in creating digital content is considerably reduced when they join the OER community in developing and sharing quality OER by avoiding duplicate e-content creation. With the annual subscription fee from the intuitions for the OER services, the program is sustainable.

OER present a strategic opportunity to improve the quality of teaching and learning as well as facilitate policy dialogue, knowledge sharing and capacity building. Further, OER can help Saudi Arabia meet the aims set out in the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, especially with regard to Goal 4: ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education, and promoting lifelong learning opportunities for all. Providing educational opportunities to all Saudi citizens requires providing teachers and students with the education materials they need and can use. However, most uses of education resources, such as making and distributing copies of textbooks, are activities that require the permission of the author because of the terms of copyright law. The most effective way to make copyrighted education resources broadly useful is for the author or rights holder to either waive copyright or to give the public broad permission to use the materials under the terms of an open copyright license. There are already millions of education resources published around the world under open licenses. However, there are limited number of Arabic OER. Our program addresses this gap of the non-availability of quality Arabic OER.

Our initiative is open to all immaterial of gender.

Our target groups are specifically Arabic educators and learners from public education, higher education and lifelong learning. With the help of our initiative, our target groups have open access to high-quality OER are available to facilitate teaching and learning. Our capacity building program on open education practices have enabled the educators in creating and sharing OER.

Our initiative was planned in March 2014 after experts from the National Center for e-Learning and stakeholders from educational institutions visited the US for the OER exchange program sponsored by the US State Department, Arab League, and ALECSO. Following which the global open education experts visited Saudi Arabia in October 2014 to conduct a National level OER awareness workshop for leaders from educational institutions during which the National Center presented the Initiative proposal which was later agreed upon by the member institutions. In December 2015, a National level OER policy workshop as an outcome the draft policy was developed. During 2016, the National platform for OER shms.sa was developed and launched as beta which was formally launched on March 5, 2018, during the open education week. Since then the program activities and impact are evaluated periodically every quarter and reports are published on the program website and shared with the stakeholders. Top contributors to the program are recognized with Excellence awards.

The key obstacles were to bring in the idea of sharing. The stakeholders were initially hesitant to share their resources. However with continuous awareness programs and training workshops, we were able to overcome the obstacles and as a result, we see the number of resources created and shared on our platform has tremendously increased over time. The key to the success of the program is the role played by the OER champions community. They are continuously creating awareness among the community members and providing timely support in coordination with the program team members at the National Center.

The National Open Education Content program is first of its kind in Saudi Arabia and in the Region where all public education institutions are collectively involved in creating and sharing OER through a National platform.

This program is derived from UNESCO’s OER initiative and other global best practices.

Within the country, most of the educational institutions have started to create institutional level awareness programs and strategies to develop OER.

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A 20 member team is handling the National program at the National center for e-Learning with financial contributions from the member institutions.

The primary benefit of OER is reducing the cost of education and providing open access to information and knowledge. The amount invested by educational institutions in creating digital content is considerably reduced when they join the OER community in developing and sharing quality OER by avoiding duplicate content creation. With the annual subscription fee from the intuitions for the OER services, the program is sustainable.

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Formal internal evaluation is done periodically (every quarter) and published on our program website. https://shms.sa/hubs/report

The indicators that were used the number of new members trained, the number of resources created and shared.

The outcome of the evaluation clearly indicates there has been a steady increase in the number of new members who are trained and the resources created and shared year on year since 2017.

Our initiative involves all institutions in public education and higher education in coordination and support of the Ministry of Education in Saudi Arabia.

The following activities describe the active collaboration, engagement, partnerships, and inclusion is the core of our initiative. A National level OER awareness workshop for leaders from educational institutions during which the National Center presented the Initiative proposal which was later agreed upon the member institutions. In December 2015, a National level OER policy workshop as an outcome the draft policy was developed. During 2016, the National platform for OER shms.sa was developed and launched as beta which was formally launched on March 5, 2018, after testing in collaboration with the institutional members, during the open education week. Since then the program activities and impact are evaluated periodically every quarter and reports are published on the program website and shared with the stakeholders. Top contributors to the program are recognized with Excellence awards.

The key lessons learned are that with active collaboration and partnerships, and engagement from stakeholders National level initiatives could result in accomplishing efficiency in terms of resource utilization and have a better social impact. In order to improve the initiative further, we are focusing on empowering the community and focussing on the train the trainer program.