The OER 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 provide 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. Also, it will be opening the way for academics and students in the Middle East to enrich the content through a well-defined process to ensure quality.

The SHMS platform which offers users to search, create and share OER, won the award for Open Education Awards for Excellence 2018 for OER Repository. It hosts about 350,000 OER among which about 200,000 OER are published, and 150,000 OER are in the review cycle. About 175,000 Arabic OER are published on SHMS, 95% of resources are from Saudi Arabia.

About 2000 plus OER Ambassadors were trained in 2017-18. NCeL announced 9 OER Excellence Award categories and 27 award winners declared for both individuals and organizations. As a result, about 30,000 plus OER are authored on SHMS, since its beta launch in 2017.

http://oer.elc.edu.sa

• Saudi Arabia

• Youth
• Women
• The unemployed
• The poor
• Refugees and internally displaced people
• Remote and rural communities
• : Educators, Students, Lifelong Learners

As the open education movement is a global movement, our program is one of several successful programs established globally. Since this project is a joint effort led by the Ministry of Education, National Center for e-Learning, Public Universities and Public Education departments in Saudi Arabia to create and share open educational resources, the same initiative can be replicated by other national level organizations.

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 annual subscription fee from the institutions for the OER services, the program is sustainable.

During our capacity building program, awareness was created amongst our stakeholders in leveraging the ICT opportunities to improve open access to information and knowledge, and the importance of sharing the information, ideas and knowledge in an inclusive information society. As a result, we see considerable progress in our educators using our ICT infrastructure to create and share OER with open licenses, and share the importance of OER with their peers.