The Deanship of E-Learning and Distance Education organized a training course on the Open Educational Resources Platform (SHMS), which was delivered by Dr. Mundhir Al-Hamzawi and Dr. Hasan Al-Sabbagh.

The course was held on Thursday, 29 Rabi` Al-Awwal, 1440 A.H., corresponding to 6 December, 2018 A.C. in the training hall at the headquarters of the deanship at the University City in Al-Abdiyyah.

The course was divided into two parts: the theoretical part tackled the importance of open educational resources (OER) and gave an explanation of the creative community licenses that protect the rights of publishers and authors. It also introduced the most important supporters of the OER platforms and the world's leading educational sites. The course also included a practical part that explained the SHMS platform, how to register in it, and how to participate by sending files or educational resources from different sites.

The SHMS platform offers many tools for use by the academic staff who can create new OER content to meet the needs of the students. It can also enable them to find educational resources, and amend them to create their own content.

The SHMS platform also provides its practitioners with the ability to create groups for those who have similar educational subjects, so that teachers from different educational institutions can publish in the same specialization group. Moreover, it enables its practitioners to evaluate the resources uploaded on the platform, and to express their opinions on the educational content.

The SHMS platform also 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.