The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 4 aims to ‘ensure inclusive and equitable quality education’. Open Educational Resources (OER) have the potential to support the removal of barriers to accessing resources and supporting inclusiveness (facilitated by digital literacy and information and communication technology). There are concerns about the quality aspect of OER, and how this is ensured for users and content creators. In addition, inclusion requires OER to be available in languages in which users prefer to access and use them. This report examines the linguistic diversity and availability of OER, in dominant as well as underserved languages. A range of well-known OER repositories were examined to identify the relative linguistic diversity of openly licensed materials. In addition, regional repositories that host OER in local and dominant languages were evaluated. Findings reveal that there is limited data available to quantify the linguistic diversity of OER globally. English remains the dominant language, although other well-known repositories contain or enable translations into other languages. A range of well-known OER repositories were examined to identify the relative linguistic diversity of openly licensed materials. In addition, regional repositories that host OER in local and dominant languages were evaluated. Findings reveal that there is limited data available to quantify the linguistic diversity of OER globally. English remains the dominant language, although other well-known repositories contain or enable translations into other languages. Most OER repositories are hosted in North America and Europe, and higher education is typically the scope of content hosted. However, in early literacy, there are notable case studies of repositories that serve local and less used languages and facilitate translations as well ascreation of new content in these languages. A key conclusion is that translations often do not capture local or indigenous knowledge and the contexts and needs of users. For the potential of OER to be fully activated in the achievement of SDG 4, the resourcesshould ideally be created in thoselanguages in which representatives of differentcommunitieswill use them, and the contentneeds to be quality-assured in ways that are relevant to those communities. A range of well-known OER repositories were examined to identify the relative linguistic diversity of openly licensed materials. In addition, regional repositories that host OER in local and dominant languages were evaluated. Findings reveal that there is limited data available to quantify the linguistic diversity of OER globally. English remains the dominant language, although other well-known repositories contain or enable translations into other languages. Most OER repositories are hosted in North America and Europe, and higher education is typically the scope of content hosted. However, in early literacy, there are notable case studies of repositories that serve local and less used languages and facilitate translations as well ascreation of new content in these languages. A key conclusion is that translations often do not capture local or indigenous knowledge and the contexts and needs of users. For the potential of OER to be fully activated in the achievement of SDG 4, the resourcesshould ideally be created in thoselanguages in which representatives of differentcommunitieswill use them, and the contentneeds to be quality-assured in ways that are relevant to those communities.
