Exploration of Open Educational Resources in Non-English Speaking Communities

Over the last decade, open educational resources (OER) initiatives have created new possibilities for knowledge-sharing practices. This research examines how, where, and when OER are attracting attention in the higher education sector and explores to what extent the OER discussion has moved beyond the English-speaking world. This study analysed English, Spanish, and Portuguese OER queries over a long-term period (20072011). The data retrieval was conducted using four online platforms: two academic journal databases (Web of Knowledge and Scopus), one video-sharing Web site (YouTube), and one document-sharing Web site (Scribd). The number (more than 32,860) of search results collected indicate an increasing interest in online OER discussion across languages, particularly outside academic journal databases. Additionally, a widening “language gap” between OER discussions in English and other languages was identified in several platforms. This research reports some of the cultural and language challenges caused by the expansion of the OER discussion and highlights relevant findings in this field.


Introduction
Open educational resources (OER, see Table 1 for definitions) are an increasingly important part of the current discourse on education. Discussions about OER are generating significant interest regarding how these resources can increase access to and quality of education, reduce educational inequality, and decrease educational costs, particularly in developing countries (Hatakka 2009;Kanwar, et al., 2010;Masterman & Wild, 2011). In this context, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the Commonwealth of Learning have been collaborating to establish global guidelines to promote OER worldwide (UNESCO & COL, 2011).
The three aims of this article are to (1) provide a theoretical overview to contextualise the current discussion about knowledge sharing and open access initiatives within the higher education (HE) sector; (2) identify some critical perspectives on OER in terms of language diversity, particularly addressing English, Spanish, and Portuguese-speaking contexts; (3) present and discuss empirical data collected over time about OER online content in English, Spanish, and Portuguese.
The key questions explored in this paper are the following. Is the OER discussion occurring beyond the English-speaking world? What evidence is there for English, Spanish, and Portuguese online content about OER in both academic and non-academic journals? Finally, is it possible to identify changes over time in online content about OER and in all three languages? Table 1 Relevant Definitions The three comprehensive definitions of OER, by Lecercle (OECD), the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the Cape Town Declaration, respectively, are as follows: 1. "[OER are] digitised materials offered freely and openly for educators, students, and self-learners to use and reuse for teaching, learning, and research. OER includes learning content, software tools to develop, use, and distribute content, and implementation resources such as open licences" (Lecercle, 2011).
2. "OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use or re-purposing by others. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, software, and any other tools, materials, or techniques used to support access to knowledge" (The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation as cited in Atkins, Brown, et al., 2007, p. 4). This definition has also been adopted in the Cape Town Open Education Declaration (Declaration, 2007) and the UNESCO Guidelines for Open Educational Resources (UNESCO & COL, 2011).
3. Open content is defined as "content that is licensed in a manner that provides users with the right to make more kinds of uses that those normally permitted under the lawat no cost to the user". The primary permissions or usage rights of open content are expressed as reuse (the right to reuse the content in its unaltered/verbatim form); revise (the right to adapt, adjust, modify or alter the content itself); remix (the right to combine the original or revised content with other content to create something new) and redistribute (the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions or your remixes with others). (Wiley 2010) These definitions share three key similarities: Open Intellectual Property Licences; the permission to use, adapt and replicate content freely; and non-discriminatory privilege (i.e., rights are provided to everyone). The OER definition used in this study is the one coined by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation in Atkins, Brown, et al. (2007, p. 4).

Knowledge Sharing and Openness in Education
The knowledge economy is a new socio-economic order in which new technologies are the drivers of knowledge production and application. Universities are expected to become a key part of the innovation system in which innovation is understood as product development (Häyrinen-Alestalo & Peltola, 2006, p. 253;Lecercle, 2011 The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited. Björk and Paetau (2012) clarify that despite the importance of the Budapest Initiative the concept has existed since the earliest days of the World Wide Web : "As soon as the web emerged, many scientists rapidly saw its potential for making the sharing of scientific information, in particular peer-reviewed journal articles, more efficient."

OER Institutionalization and Internationalization
The term open educational resource is the result of a meeting held in 2002 by UNESCO (2002). That meeting discussed three aspects of OER: technology support (standards for dissemination and exploitation); the methodology for organizing international cooperation (frameworks for collaboration); policy issues (institutional commitment, financial support, and intellectual property). Linguistic Diversity, Dominance, and Constraints In recent years, UNESCO (2012) has stressed that OER can offer a new dynamic of sharing that will provide potential learning benefits for users, particularly in developing regions (Daniel, et al., 2006;d'Antoni, 2008). Conversely, Hatakka (2009, pp. 1-2) noted that the promised benefits of OER for developing regions are not necessarily realistic because "open content is not being used by educational organizations in developing countries (or rather the usage of the free resources is low)." Contextualisation of resources presents significant obstacles to the effective reuse of OER than was originally anticipated (Kanwar, et al., 2010).
Furthermore, Stacey (2007)  around OER is their potential to increase access to education, improve quality, and reduce the cost of education in many developing countries." Nevertheless, these authors claimed that cultural elements such as the language of instruction, contextualisation, and technological infrastructure in remote regions are not sufficiently taken into account. Furthermore, OER cannot be used effectively in many developing countries because of the absence of basic infrastructure, such as internet connectivity, thus potentially widening the inequality gap. Internet penetration is 60% in the EU, 78% in the USA, and 89% in Australia, while internet penetration in Latin America and Africa is only 39.5% and 13.5%, respectively (Internet World Stats, 2011). (2012) added that OER will not lead to radical transformation in developing countries because cultural barriers are much stronger than the access to and influence of online educational content. These authors emphasised the obstacles including the historical effects of colonisation, the language barrier, and the need for basic skills.

Richter and McPherson
The OER debates are focused on top English-speaking universities. By contrast, there is less evidence of OER-HE engagement and long-term sustainability in non-Englishspeaking regions (Lecercle, 2011). Klemke et al. (2010, p. 75) added that the "language differences, cultural barriers, local relevance of materials, access concerns, and the availability of adequate technical resources (infrastructure)" can hinder a broader adoption of OER. The authors asserted that a "cultural hegemony" based on continuous improvements in the quality of English OER implies that language barriers and cultural differences could consign less developed countries to the role of "consumers" of expanding knowledge -rather than contributors to it. As long as educational materials continue to be based on a few (Western European) languages (Ouane, 2003), the use and repurposing of OER remains limited to people who have had the privilege to learn one of those elite (foreign) languages.
The production of OER in English, therefore, creates a barrier to guaranteeing the universal use or understanding of content. Rossini (2010, p. 21) adds, the language barrier should be added as an enormous socio-cultural barrier, since the vast majority of OER is in English and based on Western culture, limiting relevance outside Western culture. This further carries the risk of consigning developing countries to be placed in the role of consumers.
These limitations (i.e., teachers blocked by the language barriers) have been recently documented among the Chinese-speaking community (Huang et al., 2012), as well as among Russian (Knyazeva, 2010) and Italian speaking (Banzato, 2012)  to some extent-to obtain international recognition and to access relevant publications." Stankus also noted that "virtually all non-English authors tend to abandon publications in non-English language journals" (Stankus, 1987, p. 82).
In the case of OER, a particular tension exists between the inclusive rhetoric about OER (Daniel, et al., 2006;d'Antoni, 2008) and the reality that most of the academic publications in this field are in English. Willems and Bossu (2012, p. 191)  This methodology included the following steps.
Step 1. Selection of queries about OER in three different languages (Table 3).

Method of Sample Selection
The following platforms were included in the study. a

b) Scopus:
With 46 million records, this platform is also regarded as one of the largest abstract and citation academic databases for peer-reviewed literature (Delasalle, 2012  The table includes eight queries associated with OER in the three languages studied. These keywords were used as queries (using quotes in all cases) in this study. This multilingual sample of queries was retrieved from abstract and keywords results associated with OER searches made on Web of Knowledge and Scopus.
However, in this study, the elements that allowed the comparison of digital resources (videos, documents, and academic publications) available on different platforms (Web of Knowledge, Scopus, YouTube, and Scribd) addressed the following common parameters: digital resources retrieved under the same set of queries (Table 3), published (online) during the same period of time (2007)(2008)(2009)(2010)(2011), and offered in at least one of the three languages studied.
Two different types of platforms (academic and user-generated) were included because they made explicit references (in the title, description, abstract, keyword, or body of the text) to one or more of the eight queries associated with OER (Table 3).     The data gathered from non-academic platforms (Scribd and YouTube) indicates that search results in English were continuously growing during the period studied.
Concurrently, the search results indicate that Spanish, followed by Portuguese, grew, but at slower rates.
Nevertheless, in the period studied, the Spanish results grew more on Scribd and YouTube (85.5 and 29.1 respectively) than English (31.8 and 8.6). Similarly, in both platforms, the growth of Portuguese results was higher (226 and 8.4) or was very similar to the English growth (31.8 and 8.6) on Scribd and YouTube.
Contrary to what was observed in Figures 1 and 2, Figures 3 and 4  The imbalance between languages can by no means be considered exclusive of OER; nevertheless, this situation is more evident in academic databases rather than in usergenerated content platforms.
From the language perspective, the OER discussion has many challenges. A more evenly distributed language-based OER model seems to be a pending issue. A more languagediverse OER discussion will require a more comprehensive analysis of this topic in both the academic and non-academic domains. If these aspects are taken into account, it is likely that non-English speaking communities will receive a higher level of visibility.
The existing OER in English-speaking communities are not sufficient for global adoption and effective use of these resources. UNESCO (Daniel, et al., 2006;d Antoni, 2008) considers the lack of OER adoption in non-English speaking countries as an opportunity. However, the lack of trained users (learners and educators) from non-English speaking countries with the required skills to effectively create and repurpose OER and the absence of technology infrastructures result in a deeper divide between those who can exploit the benefits of OER and those who cannot. As described above, the adoption of OER must operate within contextual factors that vary by organisation, culture, legal, or academic factors. If these factors are not taken into account they can become barriers that challenge the expansion of OER (Hattaka, 2009;Stacey, 2007;Klemke et al., 2010, 75;Lecercle, 2011).

Conclusions
A growing interest in sharing open educational resources has been supported by a number of HE institutions, which, in turn, has promoted the principles of openness and free access as drivers of knowledge exchange. The OER initiatives described in this paper suggest the need for a new understanding of access to content capable of addressing the cultural and linguistic barriers that exist beyond opening the access to resources. This study discusses to what extent the interest in OER is adopted by Consistent and increasing evidence was retrieved from non-academic databases (Scribd and YouTube), which indicated that, in most cases, English, Spanish, and Portuguese OER online content was increasing over time. This study can also be utilised to analyse the increasing relevance of technology to facilitate exchange and visibility of knowledge generated in academic and non-academic contexts.

Limitations and Recommendation for Future Studies
The growing volume of digital content about OER in the user-generated content platforms challenges the retrieval and analysis of these resources in statistical studies.
The increasing volume of content making reference to OER published in non-academic platforms (not necessarily peer-reviewed in many cases) suggests the importance of identifying and differentiating high-quality OER from the rest. Based on that, the content selection of high-quality resources could become a time consuming process.
There are numerous opportunities for further research in this field. Supplementary research is required to analyse how the trends described in this study will evolve in the future. This study only included two non-English languages; future analysis of OER