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Before all else, we wanted to make sure we knew what we were doing and why we were doing it. So, like any good librarians, we did some research! For us, this was an environment scan – we wanted to see the scope of the land when it comes to French-language OER, and, more particularly, French-language OER in Canada. French is a minority-context language in the bulk of Canada, with recent Stats Canada findings showing that French-English bilingualism is decreasing in Canada outside of Quebec.

“The English-French bilingualism rate has been increasing in Quebec and declining outside Quebec since 2001.” Stats Canada, Census of Population, 1951 to 2021 (3901). From https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/220817/g-a005-eng.htm#shr-pg0

Your research might look different than ours, with a different scope and focus. We were lucky enough to be helped by our Research and Foresight (REF) team, who helped guide our scope and search strategies.

Writ large, our search was divided into six phases.

1. We met with our REF team, who helped us clarify goals, set a specific scope and determine a mutual understandibng amongst our researchers.
   1. Consider why you are searching and what you are searching for.
2. We identified some mutual definitions: we identified and defined key terms that would guide and inform our scan to ensure consistency amongst our researchers.
   1. Are you all speaking the same language? Are there any acronyms you need to clarify? Are you all starting at the same place?
3. Background scanning: We did an initial scan to lay the groundwork on OER and Open Access in education. This may not be necessary if all members of the research team are familiar, but it’s still good practice to brush up on current trends and knowledge.
   1. Are you up to date? Has anything new and exciting happened in the field that may impact or change proceeding with the sprint?
4. Focused scan: We scanned existing OER repositories and search engines, focusing on quantitative data such as proportion of total resources in French, size of collection, and the overlap of certain metadata fields (such as how granular subjects got).
   1. Does the thing you want to create already exist? Is it being used?
5. Institutional scan: eCampusOntario represents a consortium of publicly funded colleges, universities and indigenous institutes in Ontario, Canada – it stands to reason that we checked our institutions to see if there was already uptake of OER. Were French-language OER included in language-learning syllabi? Did our bilingual institutions have LibGuides that included guides to finding French-language OER ?
   1. What does your target population already use? Is there a gap?
6. Considering gaps: We found that OER in French are not as prevalent as their English counterparts. It was now that we examined this lack of data for what it was – data itself! So we went back to the literature and examined the availability for French language resources, whether they be open or not, and saw if they correlated with the gaps we found in French-language OER.
   1. Did you find anything? If not, is that also something? Are there other factors that could be at play?