Education, an essential human right, is considered the fundamental foundation of any society. In our knowledge-based world, education is the best investment countries can make to build prosperous, healthy and equitable societies. Following a collaboration with Open Education Global Francophone and with the objective of increasing access to education for all and for all and improving the quality of education, we are launching the OERWiki @ MENA initiative to the development and use of Open Educational Resources (OER) in the MENA region.

UNESCO has defined Open Educational Resources (OER) as learning, teaching and research materials in any format and medium, in the public domain or protected by the right of author and published under open licenses, which authorize their consultation, reuse, use for other purposes, adaptation and redistribution by others free of charge.

OER can be learning or assessment resources: course materials, homework, tests, images, audio resources, video resources, etc. The UNESCO Recommendation on Open Educational Resources (OER) was adopted unanimously on November 25, 2019 by 193 UNESCO Member States.The Learning Lab of the University of Sousse and the Learning Lab of the University of Alexandria, partners of the “LETS Learning Lab Network” project, launch the OERWiki @ MENA initiative as a Learning Lab activity, designed and initiated by Dr. Lilia Cheniti Master of lectures at the University of Sousse in Tunisia and Dr. Ghada El Khayat Professor at the University of Alexandria in Egypt.

This initiative aims to spark a movement among the academic community at the level of these two universities, as well as other universities in the MENA region around open educational resources. This initiative will encourage collaboration and sharing through the co-creation of educational material and the freedom to use, personalize, improve and redistribute it. To this end, a WIKI environment for sharing free educational resources will be set up, allowing the university community to create and collaborate on free content, and to share them as free educational resources under a Creative Commons license.

A challenge of producing and sharing 100 OERs for 100 Days will be launched. Awareness and information seminars on OER and Creative Commons licenses will accompany this initiative.

The initiative will follow the schedule below:

The initiative is launched within the framework of the activities of the learning labs of Alexandria and Sousse universities, project partners in the project: “LETS Learning Lab Network”. It aims to trigger a movement among the university community at the level of these two universities, as well as in other universities in the MENA region around open educational resources.

This initiative will encourage collaboration and sharing through the co-creation of educational material and the freedom to use, personalize, improve and redistribute it. To this end, a Portal environment for sharing free educational resources will be set up, allowing the university community to create and collaborate on free content, and to share them as free educational resources under a Creative Common license. A challenge of producing and sharing 100 OERs in 100 Days is announced.

The first Webinar, part of this initiative, is delivered during the open education week 2021 on the 1st of March 2021 at 3.P.M Tunisia Time and 4 P.M Egypt Time. During this webinar guests will present the following sessions :

1. Becoming familiar with OER (By Prof. Koutheair Khribi, Mada Center Qatar)
2. OER: licensing issues (By Prof. Khalid Berrada, Cadi Ayyad University, Morocco)
3. Searching and Using OER (By Prof. Haifa Ben El Hadj, Qatar University)
4. OER: Managing your project (By Prof. Mahmoud Khalil, Alexandria and Beirut Arab Universities)
5. OER: New Egyptian Portals to host them (By Prof. Ramy Iskander, National E-learning Center)

Following these sessions, an Ask the Experts session is organized where participants in the initiative will address their questions relative to OER and Licensing Practices. The duration of the webinar is 150mn.

The link to access to the webinar is the following : https://urlz.fr/eOL6 

Looking forward to meeting you during the webinar.

Pr. Ghada EL Khayat , Coordinator Learning Lab Alexandria University, Egypt

Pr. Lilia Cheniti, Coordinator Learning Lab Sousse University, Tunisia