OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES

Research Proposal: Open Educational Resources in Saudi Arabia

Research Proposal: Open Educational Resources in Saudi Arabia

Working Title

Open Educational Resources in Saudi Arabia: Achievement, Challenges, Development

Context

Open Educational resources are freely available teaching materials, learning and research that are in the public domain or have been published with an intellectual property license that permits their use, adaptation and free distribution. The term Learning Resources (OER) is a worldwide movement launched by foundations, universities, teachers and educators to create and distribute via the Internet educational resources (courses, manuals, software educational, etc.), free and open. The concept was inspired by related concepts such as Creative Commons, Open Source, Open Data and Open Access, and extends them to include presentations and other tutorial.

Open educational resources were adopted for the first time at the 2002 Forum of UNESCO on the impact of free software courses for higher education in developing countries. Mainly financed by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Learning Resources (OER) are digitized materials offered freely for educators, students and learners to reuse for teaching, learning and research. OERs were discussed at the Second Global Forum on Quality Assurance, Accreditation and the Recognition of Qualifications. The open educational resources (OER) were defined as;

Learning Resources: course software, content modules, objects of study, student support and assessment tools, such as learning communities and online.

Support resources for teachers: tools for teachers and support materials to enable them to create adapt and use OER, as well as training materials and other teaching tools for teachers.

Resources to ensure the quality of education and educational practices.

In Arab states, OERs have been considered to be important drivers of educational outcomes. Saudi Arabia, like many other countries around the world, has, over the years, sought to improve its education system by introducing reforms and making projections based on the education needs of the country. Despite the clarity of the constitutional provisions on education, adoption within a framework of national education policy remains ambiguous (Bashshur 2004). On the one hand, most of these forecasts can be seen, arguably, as part of the education perspectives on the current government. On the other hand, the current education programs of the government seem to be informed less by the constitution for its vision of education as part of its own strategy for economic regeneration and development. From the mid-80's, the national education policy has focused on concerns about reversing the collapse, and reform the system to suit the needs of Saudi Arabia (Bashshur 2004). These two pillars of education policy were conditioned, which certainly was at the root of the collapse of education. This affected the education policy on two levels. First, spending on education was felt imperative to reduce public spending and run a greater share of education spending from public to private. Second, the social use of education was linked to the development of human resources for economic development strategy guided by the market and private enterprise.

As stated in key documents of Saudi Arab's educational strategy, the fundamental objective of national education policy is to create ...