Developing Institutional Open Educational Resource Repositories in Vietnam: Opportunities and Challenges

The introduction of open educational resources (OER) provides new opportunities for learners worldwide to access high-quality educational materials at the lowest cost. As a developing country, Vietnam is one of the countries that can most benefit from the OER movement. However, the concept of OER in Vietnam remains little known to the public, with few institutional OER repositories (IOER) developed. This study contends that IOER development in Vietnam is complicated and constrained by many contextual difficulties; it was designed to explore the challenges and opportunities. After a literature review, 20 semi-structured interviews were conducted with relevant stakeholders. Building on the findings from the literature, this study found that IOER development in Vietnam is constrained by five categories of challenges: (a) technological and infrastructure matters, (b) economic constraints, (c) sociocultural characteristics, (d) pedagogical concerns, and (e) legal limitations. Many of these challenges are not identified in the literature and provide insights into potential implications and solutions for future IOER in Vietnam and other countries.


Introduction
Educational Resources in Higher Education) . Additional impetus was provided by World Congresses in Paris (2012) and Ljubljana (2017), both organised by UNESCO. The Ljubljana OER action plan (UNESCO, 2017) led to the UNESCO Recommendation on OER, adopted by all 193 member states (UNESCO, 2019). Although the establishment of the OER movement, closely connected to UNESCO, represents a top-down approach, the OER movement has subsequently been driven by grassroot initiatives, communities, and individuals. National authorities, such as the Ministries of Education in the Philippines and Slovenia or supra-national ones, such as the European Union, have started to consider OER as a valuable strategy only in recent years (European Commission, 2013;Stracke, 2019).
OER comprise all types of educational resource in a global, national, or institutional repository that are released with an open license, granting free access and the right to adapt and reproduce resources (Truong, 2020). This study investigates the development of institutional OER repositories (IOER), defined as online archives in universities used for collecting, preserving, and disseminating OER. These OER are either the intellectual output of the university or localised resources from elsewhere.
In Vietnam, the concept of OER was introduced almost two decades ago. In 2002, the Fulbright Economics Teaching Program in Vietnam published its teaching and research materials online. Universities and their libraries in Vietnam have been enthusiastic about participating in OER programs offered by the government or other agencies. However, they remain hesitant to create their own IOER, reflected in the lack of operational IOER. It is believed that the development of IOER in Vietnam is complicated and constrained by contextual difficulties, but little research has been published as to why this is. This article reports on exploratory research designed to investigate the challenges and opportunities in promoting and developing IOER in Vietnam.

Literature Review
A considerable volume of literature about OER published since 2000 suggests that building a highquality, diverse, and sustainable OER repository is challenging and requires preparation and a wellthought-out strategy on the part of decision-makers and implementers (e.g., Coughlan et al., 2019;Friesen, 2009 Numerous studies have reported constraints related to computing and communications infrastructure in less developed or developing countries (Mtebe & Raisamo, 2014;Ngimwa & Wilson, 2012;Thumbumrung & Aroonpiboon, 2018). Some studies (e.g., Dutta, 2016;McGreal, 2017;Mosharraf & Taghiyareh, 2016) also indicate that the successful harnessing of OER can be affected by economic factors. Developing IOER requires an initial investment in information and communication technologies (ICT) facilities and infrastructure, services, production costs, policy development, training, and marketing campaigns. Sustaining an IOER project may require significant long-term commitment of resources as the repository's quality is dependent on the quality of maintenance, curation, and preservation (Hodgkinson-Williams, 2010;Hu et al., 2015;Thumbumrung & Aroonpiboon, 2018).
Sociocultural characteristics have been recognised as a major challenge to advocacy of the open movement in general. These include linguistic diversity, cultural sensitivities, and diversity within a country, as well as stakeholders' characteristics, such as their awareness, willingness, and capacity to adopt OER (Hu et al., 2015;McGreal, 2017;Thumbumrung & Aroonpiboon, 2018 with third-party copyright issues, can prove problematic (Dutta, 2016;OECD, 2007;Pena, 2009).
Scholars in Vietnam (e.g., Do, 2013;Do et al., 2019) have reported contextual challenges to the OER movement based on their conceptions or the perspectives of users, such as users' limited capacity in using OER, the prevalent teaching and learning approaches in the country, or problems related to copyright and IP rights. In Vietnam and internationally, there is a scarcity of empirical research relating to the development of IOER from the viewpoint of higher education providers. The primary goal of the current study is to answer the following question from the perspective of higher education providers: What are the opportunities and challenges in developing IOER in Vietnam? Elman et al. (2020) state that researchers consider using an exploratory approach when there is a general lack of knowledge or little information about the research topic. Because of the lack of research into the contextual challenges and opportunities facing IOER development in Vietnam, the current project was designed as exploratory research. To achieve its objectives, this qualitative study was conducted by adopting an interpretive research paradigm with an inductive reasoning approach capable of providing in-depth understanding of the phenomena being investigated from the interviewees' perspectives. Goldkuhl (2012, p. 135) states that a qualitative approach is often associated with the interpretivist paradigm, which can be applied to "social constructs that are complex and always evolving, making them less amendable to precise measurement or numerical interpretation" (Glesne & Peshkin, 1992, p. 6). Data were collected through interviews with participants who know about or had participated in the OER movement or IOER development in Vietnam. A combination of non-probability averaging 70 minutes. The interviews were semi-structured, with an opening question ("What are the challenges and opportunities of developing IOER at your institution and in Vietnam?") followed by more probing questions (e.g., "How do copyright laws affect teachers and students?"; "Why is achieving institutional autonomy important for OER repository development?").

Methods
The collected data were first transcribed verbatim and then analysed using the conventional content analysis approach (Hsieh & Shannon, 2005). Using NVivo 12, the codes and concepts emerged directly from the data during the coding process. These were then compared with the literature to gain a broader understanding of the context and sorted into meaningful categories and themes based on their nature, relationships, and suggestions that resulted from the comparison.

Findings
Five categories of challenges for the development of IOER in Vietnam were derived from the data analysis: technological and infrastructure issues, economic constraints, sociocultural characteristics, pedagogical concerns, and legal limitations.

Technological and Infrastructure Matters
IOER are primarily collections of digital resources requiring digital tools, software, and systems to be used, and so the impact of technological factors must be considered. Access to ICT devices and Internet connectivity in Vietnam is not an issue; however, 14 interviewees raised technology issues such as low bandwidth, obsolete technologies, and limited access to ICT facilities and hosting services. One champion (C2) suggested that smaller universities in remote areas may find these issues especially challenging and that although a university in Vietnam may be able to develop an IOER to serve its students and staff, it would not be able to afford to serve the whole country or the world. This is potentially a critical issue affecting sustainability, because although the use of FOSS typically requires an initial investment and a reliable arrangement for ongoing maintenance, the costs are generally significantly less than for commercial software and systems and, in particular, annual licence fees.
All interviewees considered university libraries to be best placed to implement IOER within higher education organisations (HEOs of technology need to be addressed to facilitate the development and adoption of the infrastructure needed to support IOER projects. This will take time, money, and significant effort.

Economic Constraints
The lack of funding for IOER development projects was identified as a critical obstacle by seven interviewees, with funding required for improvements to ICT infrastructure, software and hardware maintenance, staff costs, training, and marketing. Such costs need to be provided for in university budgets and underpinned by appropriate policies and procedures. The director of a university library (OL3) was discouraged by the heavy cost pressures that libraries have recently been under, especially for commercial software licensing and scholarly resources subscriptions.
A library administrator commented, "We need to consider the sustainability aspect, like the annual maintenance fee, who will invest money to do that? … The creation [of IOER] may not be hard but maintaining it is extremely difficult" (LA1). Indeed, apart from initial financial investment to implement the IOER project, the university needs to secure funding to sustain it.
Participants suggested that the type of education establishment influences the IOER development project. Universities in Vietnam, especially public universities, are overseen by the government and its agencies and have less autonomy than other types of educational establishments. Approximately 70% of HEOs are publicly funded and must follow state budget laws when planning and carrying out their activities. Financial issues can thus present a significant barrier to projects such as IOER development.
This situation may be changing, as many public universities are currently transitioning from the old system of state subsidies to autonomy based on self-financing mechanisms, a move aimed at improving 114 the quality of tertiary education. As of 2020, the government has given some key public universities in Vietnam autonomy in areas including the right of self-government in developing policies, designing curriculums, managing budgets, calling for funding, and recruiting personnel. Eleven interviewees suggested that achieving autonomy opens up potential opportunities for public universities to develop IOER in the future. This is seen as an extremely important facilitating factor for the OER movement in Vietnam in general.
The findings suggest that a lack of funding is a principal reason why many university and library administrators are apathetic towards the OER movement in Vietnam.

Sociocultural Characteristics
Interviewees raised many sociocultural issues they considered problematic, including a shortage of policy from government and university leaders regarding OER and IOER use and development, HEO communities and their attributes such as awareness about OER, attitudes to copyright and copyright enforcement, technological and information literacy, and English proficiency.
The Vietnamese government leads the country through the legal system, policies, and guidelines,

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an IOER leader was surprised to find that some outside users were paying for access to OER materials from a third party when they were freely available on the library website (OL1). As many potential users cannot distinguish between the different copyright statuses of materials, they see little benefit in OER and so lack the motivation to develop and use OER.
Additional challenges relate to the skill levels of OER users and producers in areas such as digital and information literacy and English proficiency. Half of the interviewees suggested that limited digital and information skills are holding users back in terms of harnessing OER efficiently. The basic computer skills of the majority of Vietnamese people are relatively good compared with those of people in other developing countries; however, the capacity for searching, evaluating, localising, and classifying OER remains a hurdle. A library staff member (LS2) observed that many users were confused about evaluating the information sources found on the Internet.
Published OER are expected to be in Vietnamese; however, most existing materials are in English, so proficiency in English is required for their effective use. An IOER leader (OL2) at a foreign-owned university suggested that the process of developing its IOER had been less complicated than it would have been at a key public university, which this participant had previously worked at, due to students at this foreign-owned university having high proficiency in English. A champion added that "foreign language ability of Vietnamese users is quite poor. In the past, MIT provided us thousands of open courses, but our users couldn't use them because they could not understand [those OER]. What a waste!" (C1).
As an educator, a certain level of fluency in English is also required to understand and localise these materials: Lecturers can use Google translate, but their knowledge of the language is also crucial as they cannot just use Google translate to convert the material's language to Vietnamese and then publish or share it, they need to proofread and revise the content. (OL1) This particular problem may be changing as Vietnam's government has recently launched Englishtaught advanced training programs at many universities to improve students' English proficiency (LA3).
Further, despite numerous potential socioeconomic barriers, in 2018, the minister of Information and Communications submitted a proposal to make Vietnam's second language English, to assist the integration of Vietnam into the global economy. The proposal has received strong support from the community, and the expectation is that in the near future, English will be widely used in Vietnam (C1).
Notwithstanding the challenges, the OER movement in Vietnam has the prospect of growing vigorously thanks to proactive champions who are committed to OER activities. Moreover, an increase in the number of university lecturers with overseas training and qualifications is expected to increase awareness of and understanding about the open movement, copyright, and IP rights in Vietnam (OL3; LA4).

Pedagogical Concerns
Consistent with the literature, this study found that IOER development is impacted by a range of pedagogical issues, including the characteristics of teaching and learning, the existence and popularity of OER in Vietnamese and of developed IOER, and a general lack of recognition of libraries' essential roles. Some of these are closely associated with the economic constraints and sociocultural characteristics identified in previous sections. Over there, students must go to the library and look for references for their assignments.
Students here, on the other hand, only need to learn from the given textbooks. … They have no independence and desire to learn beyond that. (LA4) These attitudes may be changing. Recognising the fact that in the information age, the ability to perceive, find, and use information has become a critical skill, a university rector emphasised the importance of encouraging students' curiosity and research: It's the responsibility of the lecturers in developing the curriculum that requires students to search for and use more learning resources. Our university's training program is designed to reduce the time on classes and give students more time for self-studying. (UA2) A related issue is lack of familiarity with the culture of sharing IP, for example, by waiving copyright and related rights, which is necessary in an OER environment. A library staff member commented: "In There was a university library that had two identical dissertations located next to each other on the shelf with the same classification numbers and no one had noticed them. The first librarian catalogued the first book, and after a few years, the second staff member did the second one, so they didn't recognise them. In the end, a reader explored the similarity when reading both of them. (LA3) There is also a perception that Vietnamese OER are poor quality. Graduate students will pay more attention to research-supported materials such as open data or academic publications than to lecture slides. Thus, the comment above may not necessarily reflect poor quality but a failure to properly target or cater for the needs of different stakeholders.
Six interviewees reported that currently, OER initiatives in Vietnamese HEOs are mostly ad hoc, with no university having successfully developed a genuine IOER. This situation has led to higher education communities' lack of confidence and willingness to harness OER for teaching and learning practices, or to engage with IOER development activities.
All interviewees regarded university libraries to be best placed to implement and maintain IOER.
However, lack of recognition of libraries' essential roles in learning and teaching by other stakeholders was seen as presenting a serious obstacle to IOER development. Such attitudes impact on library staff who, despite acknowledging the benefits of OER, lose motivation due to a lack of authority and incentives, as suggested by two interviewees. These issues appeared to be connected to the type of educational institution and the degree of autonomy of decision-making allowed: private and foreign universities in Vietnam have higher levels of autonomy in comparison with public universities, and thus, they have more flexibility and authority in using and creating OER and developing IOER. The IOER leader from a foreign-owned university explained:

Legal Issues
Because the concept of OER was only formulated in 2002, it can be expected that issues would arise with the legal systems of numerous countries and that those issues would need to be addressed to create a supportive legal framework. Although Vietnam's IP legislation covers every aspect of the protection of repository so that users could notice the copyright infringements by students at that university.
Consistent with previous studies, this research found that the limitations and inconsistencies of Vietnam's legal system constrain IOER development and also the OER movement in this country.

Discussion
This research supports the findings reported in the literature: that when developing OER and IOER, HEOs in countries such as Vietnam face a set of challenges in terms of technological and infrastructure matters, economic constraints, sociocultural problems, pedagogical concerns, and legal limitations.
Technology-related factors were identified as influential on the OER movement and especially on the development of IOER in Vietnam, similar to that in other countries described in the literature (e.g., Mtebe & Raisamo, 2014;Ngimwa & Wilson, 2012;Torres, 2013 This investigation has explored many sociocultural challenges that constrain higher education providers in developing IOER. Among them, the lack of stakeholders' advocacy was identified as the biggest obstacle to the OER movement in Vietnam, also recognised in previous research in other countries (Hu et al., 2015;Thumbumrung & Aroonpiboon, 2018;Torres, 2013 Developing an open education system, building a learning society to create opportunities for everyone to have access to education, learning at all levels, all forms, and lifelong"; and Article 6, clause 1 says, "The national education system is an open and interconnected education system including formal education and continuing education" (Vietnam Government Portal, 2019a). It is expected that the newly released Law on Libraries, which came into effect in July 2020, will help libraries to function more efficiently and boldly, as it clearly defines the rights, obligations, and responsibilities of agencies, organisations, and individuals with respect to libraries and their activities (Vietnam Government Portal, 2019b).
In general, this research contributes considerably to the knowledge of IOER development from the perspectives of higher education providers. As noted, the Vietnamese government has recently officially declared its support for the OER movement via official dispatches and documents. In responding, universities in Vietnam must actively create favourable conditions for their lecturers, researchers, students, and learners to harness and create OER. Universities can refer to this study's findings to develop strategic plans to leverage opportunities and overcome obstacles when developing IOER.
Although these findings resulted from investigation in Vietnam, they may be applicable in supporting the development of IOER in other countries that have similar economic, cultural, social, and/or educational conditions to Vietnam. In Vietnam, stakeholders' lack of awareness of OER and advocacy are the most frequently raised serious challenges. Although the exact nature of these challenges varies according to the context of specific countries, OER advocates in other countries might face similar issues. They are urged to organise more OER promotion and awareness-raising activities that increase recognition of OER and their advantages among stakeholders. Once stakeholders understand the potential of OER, they can recognise their need for OER use and decide to support the OER and IOER development. Decision-makers should also incorporate libraries and library staff in any OER-related projects. These activities can be accomplished with sound procedures and policy, especially those on recognition, commendation, and rewards on using and creating OER and developing IOER.

Conclusion
This research was designed to explore the opportunities in and challenges to the development of IOER in Vietnam. It identified challenges including: technological and infrastructure issues, economic constraints, sociocultural difficulties, pedagogical matters, and legal constraints. Many of these have not been previously noted in the literature. A number of opportunities were also identified, however, there remains a sense that they are outweighed by the challenges. This study also found that the

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opportunities and challenges of the OER movement in Vietnam are interconnected. It is beyond the scope of this study to examine the opportunities and challenges of using OER from the perspectives of users. A further study focusing on the viewpoints of users in using OER in Vietnam is therefore suggested.