As a part of its comprehensive training program for the first semester, the Vice Deanship of E-Learning for Academic Development and Community Service organized a training session for the faculty members on the Saudi Open education resource network “SHMS”. It was presented by Dr. Al-Asaad Al-Samerany and Dr. Mundhir Al-Hamzawy. The course was held at the training hall at the Deanship’s premises at the University Campus in Abdyia on Thursday, Safar 5, 1440H (October 15, 2018).

The session included a theoretical side that tackled the importance of the open educational resources (OER) and gave an explanation for the Creative Commons (CC) licenses that preserve the property rights of the publishers and authors. It also identified the most important supporters for the OER platforms and different leading educational websites around the world. The session also included a practical part for how to register in SHMS and share files or educational resources from different websites.

 It is evident that SHMS Platform offers many tools to be used by the faculty members, who can create new OER content to meet the unique needs of students, find educational resources and amend them to create their own content. It also allows forming groups with the common theme to be the similar educational topics, therefore, teachers from different educational institutions can share in the same specialty group. The platform also allows its users to rate the uploaded resources and to comment on the educational contents.  Moreover, it includes the Open Author tool which can be used to create and collaborate on new resources. In other words, texts, images, sounds, videos, or supplemental materials can be combined into resources that can be shared and remixed with colleagues and educators around the world.

Supervising the event, Dr. Yasser Al-Hazemy, the Vice-Dean of the Deanship for Academic Development and Community Service, pointed that the participants shallupload educational resources in the coming few days to confirm their membership in SHMS and obtain certificates from the National Center for E-Learning.