Open Educational Resources (OERs) are freely accessible, openly licensed text, media, and other digital assets that are useful for teaching, learning, training and research purposes.
OERs are easy to distribute on a wide scale. They contribute to disseminating the culture of collaborative and participatory work and to promoting skill and capacity development. They are housed in web-based digital repositories that provide quick access for users via search engines or keywords. In recent years, prestigious international educational institutions have established repositories of their open educational resources. Today, regional groupings are making great efforts to develop similar repositories and use them in a participatory manner, despite differences in nationality and language.
Some OER projects have emerged in the Arab region. However, there is still an urgent need to establish a unified Arab digital repository that would help coordinate efforts and pave the way for the emergence of a common space covering all Arab States (www.alecso.org/oer).
It is within this framework that ALECSO has launched its project for the promotion of Arab Open Educational Resources, through :
- Developing the OER platform;
- Entering the open educational resources into the platform;
- Organizing training of trainers (ToT) workshops on the use of the OER platform.
