A STUDY ON OA & OER IN H IGHER E DUCATION I NSTITUTES

Since Open Education Resources (OER) approved in the early 2000s, it has grown as a major source of free learning materials for higher education; it is available for anyone to reuse, revise and redistribute based on the Creative Commons (CC), ready to give people worldwide equal access to collective knowledge and quality education by making good quality lectures, curricula, and books. In this paper, a brief history of OER is stated, then focused on categories of OER, ending with a discussion of the impact on reducing spending money on books compared to (Open Access) OA and OER


I. Introduction
The Open Education Resources(OER) is a simple concept, where it is legal based on the Creative Commons license. It is economical, where it shows the educational resources that are freely available for use by lecturers and students or learners with no need of paying fees or license. A wide range of systems is developing to oversee how OERs are authorized for use, some of which basically permit copying and others that make arrangements for users to adjust the resources that they use. The most well-known of these is the Creative Commons licenses that give people the recognition to their work after it is distributed, taking into consideration restriction a commercial activity if it is set by the license under the six different license types.
With the beginning of information and communication technologies and the occurrence of digital cultures together with open licensing practices, OER has evolved as a major source of educational materials at various levels. So open textbooks and open courseware are good examples. OER has broadly defined as freely and openly accessible resources that are useful for educational purposes. These resources are usually delivered by electronic means via the Web, taking the forms of electronic books, courseware, streaming videos, learning objects, or software and tools to support learning. OER is formally defined as the "digitized materials offered freely and openly for educators, students, and self-learners to use and re-use for teaching, learning, and research." [1]

II. Categories of OER
There are four categories of Open Education Resources (OER) for higher education, namely, open textbooks, open courseware, open online courses, and open-source software and tools to support teaching and learning. In the following, we characterize each of them in accordance with nature, purposes, and usage [11].

A. Open Textbooks
Open textbooks are, by nature, self-contained electronic books that can be accessible online and downloadable for offline usage. They invariably ‫األسمرية‬ ‫الجامعة‬ ‫مجلة‬ : ‫والتطبيقية‬ ‫األساسية‬ ‫العلوم‬ Journal of Alasmarya University: Basic and Applied Sciences consist of digital content that can be delivered in different formats, including texts, images, audio, video and other multimedia versions. They are coherent in contents and aligned to particular textbook guidelines and standards, and can be customized to meet individual needs. Open textbooks can be used as traditional textbooks for classroom-based teaching, as well as for self-learning, in universities and faculties. They are self-contained in the sense that the textbook contents are substantial enough and well organized as a single volume on a special subject or topic.
Open textbooks have a number of advantageous features over traditional textbooks. They are free and openly available. Revisions and updates of textbook contents can be made efficiently. Instructors and students need not wait long for the revised textbooks, as the revisions and updates can be made online for instant access. Moreover, open textbooks allow easy adaptation and modification to cater for the learning difference, where instructors may select and customize the textbooks to fitspecific teaching and learning needs of individual groups.

B. Open Course Ware
IT is a free and open digital platform for high-quality university-level educational materials. These materials are organized as courses and often include course planning materials and evaluation tools as well as any related content. Open Course Ware are free and openly licensed, accessible to anyone and anytime through the internet.

C. open online courses
This category assists the exchange of knowledge sharing among participants who may enter with different levels of experience and skill. Many of these courses in this category are free to access worldwide, and students may require to pay a fee for getting the certificate or an evaluation of overall learning by exam, but in the Covid pandemic, most of them were free. Also, some open classes require students to register or enroll, even though they do not have to pay or subscribe. Open-source software and tools are software tools that are freely available with no commercial license. A wide range of sorts of open-source instruments permits designers and others to do certain programming things, keeping up innovations or different kinds of innovation assignments.

III. Reducing the cost of higher education through the use of OER.
Cost is one of the essential points to be taken into consideration; that's why educators are working on Open Education Resources (OER) to reduce this cost, especially in higher education, where cost increases [12][13][14][18]. Petrides et al. made a survey on 31 staff members of a faculty and 45 students; this survey was nine years ago [17], regarding a proposed textbook in statistics and Collaborative Statistics. Both staff members and students decided to reduce cost as the most important factor for their interest in using OER in the future. One staff member decided expensive textbooks as "an obstacle to college access" [17]. So this was a sample study was done before, where another study was [12] in six years ago with seven community faculties across the nation, found the average textbook cost to be $90.61, which would result in a full-time student spending over $900 on textbooks per year. To deal with these high costs, some students did not purchase the required text, drop the course, or take fewer courses [15].  OER is not explicitly about e-learning. Many people wrongly conclude that because it is the digital architecture of the Internet that has facilitated the sharing of content, this means that OER is about sharing content for e-learning, but there is no logic to this.

IV. Conclusion
As the expenses of higher education keep on rising, open educational resources assets are a potential answer to facilitate the money related weight understudies face. These assets have been discovered to be similarly as compelling as conventional materials utilized in the classroom.
Students accepted the nature of OER was superior to that of customary reading material. They additionally revealed feeling more drew in with open materials on account of the intelligence these materials encouraged. OER gives greater adaptability and flexibility to teachers to impact the materials and rebuild their courses. This implies OER could assist Students with accomplishing their instructive objectives in less time by opening up assets to pay for extra classes. To be compelling, making and sharing OER is basically about cooperating towards a typical reason, regardless of whether this is inside a single faculty or over a worldwide organization.