Claudia Ayala
email: cayala@essi.upc.edu

Daniela S Cruzes

Anh Duc Nguyen

Reidar Conradi
email: conradi@idi.ntnu.no

Xavier Franch
email: franch@essi.upc.edu

Martin Höst
email: martin.host@cs.lth.se

Muhammad Ali Babar

OSS Integration Issues and Community Support: An Integrator Perspective

The reuse and integration of Open Source Software (OSS) components provided by OSS communities is becoming an economical and strategic need for today's organizations. The integration of OSS components provides many benefits, but also risks and challenges. One of the most important risks is the lack of effective and timely OSS community support for dealing with possible integration problems. For gaining an understanding of the common problems that organizations face when integrating OSS components, and the role played by OSS communities, we performed an exploratory study on 25 OSS integration projects from different European organizations. The results show that the main way of reducing integration problems was the use of OSS components from well-established communities; therefore very few integration problems were identified. In most of the cases these problems were successfully solved with the support from the OSS community and/or colleagues. In addition, contrary to the common belief that understanding code from someone else is a hard and undesirable task, some integrators consider OSS code even more understandable than their own code.

Introduction

The free availability of Open Source Software (OSS) has over the last decade had a significant impact, not only on the software IT industry, but also on softwareintensive organizations. OSS is significantly influencing the ways these organizations develop, acquire, use, and commercialize software [START_REF] Ayala | Five Facts on the Adoption of Open Source Software[END_REF], and actual evidence shows that organizations are clearly becoming a very important part of the OSS communities

In particular, the integration of OSS components is one of the most popular ways of adopting OSS [START_REF] Hauge | Adoption of Open Source Software in Software-Intensive Organizations -A Systematic Literature Review[END_REF]. It involves including OSS components into other software products or systems and this again may involve modifying, extending, or wrapping the OSS components.

OSS integration might have many benefits, such as significantly lower (purchasing) costs, availability of high quality products, adherence to open standards and vendor independence [START_REF] Ayala | Five Facts on the Adoption of Open Source Software[END_REF]. However, it also implies several challenges. On the one hand, we may mention that OSS components do not always satisfy all the requirements. In certain cases, some "glue code" or modifications are required to make OSS components work together. This however creates a customized version of the OSS component. The integrator (i.e., the person(s) in charge of integrating OSS component(s) into the software system) is then faced with the issue of maintaining this derived version, and must decide how to handle these extensions and modifications. As a result, each organization that modifies OSS components and incorporates them in its own applications is faced with the issue of whether to contribute or not to the OSS community [START_REF] Bac | Why and how to contribute to libre software when you integrate them into an in-house application?[END_REF], [START_REF] Stol | Challenges in using open source software in product development: a review of the literature[END_REF]. On the other hand, some studies emphasize that high-quality OSS components rely heavily on having a large, sustainable community to develop code rapidly, debug code effectively, and build new features [START_REF] Aberdour | Achieving Quality in Open Source Software[END_REF]. Thus, the organizations that integrate OSS components into their systems represent a potential base of contributing members needed to sustain the OSS communities [START_REF] Nakakoji | Evolution Patterns of Open-Source Software Systems and Communities[END_REF].

It is therefore vital to provide evidence that help OSS communities to envisage strategies to improve potential integration issues; as well as organizations to meet some practical challenges related to OSS integration. In this context, the goal for this study is therefore gaining an understanding of the common problems that organizations face when integrating OSS components, and the role that the OSS communities play in such integration processes. Thus, we conducted an empirical study on European organizations from Norway, Spain, Sweden and Denmark. It consisted on semi-structured interviews with 25 integrators from different organizations that represented 25 different integration projects. Based on their answers, we were able to draw some observations. We report our main findings in this paper.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 provides an overview of existing evidence on OSS integration and companies' participation. Section 3 provides details of the empirical study. Section 4 summarizes the most relevant observations from the interviews. Section 5 discusses the results. Threats to validity are presented in Section 6, while Section 7 summarizes the conclusions and future work.

Background and Related Work

Recent systematic reviews reveal that integration is one of the most popular strategies of adopting OSS [START_REF] Hauge | Adoption of Open Source Software in Software-Intensive Organizations -A Systematic Literature Review[END_REF], [START_REF] Stol | Challenges in using open source software in product development: a review of the literature[END_REF].

The company-community relationships have been explored in works as [START_REF] Dahlander | Relationships between open source software companies and communities: observations from Nordic firms[END_REF], [START_REF] Dahlander | How do firms make use of open source communities?[END_REF], [START_REF] Capra | A Survey on Firms' Participation in Open Source Community Projects[END_REF]. In [START_REF] Dahlander | Relationships between open source software companies and communities: observations from Nordic firms[END_REF], the authors identify three types of organization-community relationships: Symbiotic: Both the community and the organization benefit from the relationship. Commensalistic: The organization benefits from the relationship but the community is not affected.

Parasitic: The organization benefits from the relationship but at the same time it damages the community.

Several barriers to contribute back to the community have been also investigated as for instance by Ven and Mannaert [START_REF] Ven | Challenges and strategies in the use of open source software by independent software vendors[END_REF] that found that deciding not to contribute can also be risky as one may be forced to maintain a parallel copy of the product. Furthermore, Stol and Ali Babar in [START_REF] Stol | Challenges in using open source software in product development: a review of the literature[END_REF] did a systematic synthesis of the reported challenges of integrating OSS and ended up with a comprehensive list of challenges related to OSS integration. Even though there is a considerable body of research on the challenges of integrating OSS components in the development of software products [START_REF] Hauge | Adoption of Open Source Software in Software-Intensive Organizations -A Systematic Literature Review[END_REF], [START_REF] Stol | Challenges in using open source software in product development: a review of the literature[END_REF], the majority of these works refer to success stories derived from single case studies or experience reports that provide very limited information about the real industrial landscape of companies integrating OSS components. Moreover, the role that OSS communities play on supporting integrators to solve their integration problems has not been further explored. Therefore, our overall objective is gaining an understanding of the common problems that organizations face when integrating OSS components, and the role that the OSS communities play in such integration processes.

Survey on OSS Integration Issues and Community Support

Our overall objective has been broken down into two research questions that are at their turn broken down into more concrete sub research questions.

On the one hand, RQ1 was aimed to inquiry on potential integration issues. RQ1.1 is focused on inquiring the most common integration problems. Furthermore, the literature has pointed out the underestimation of integration effort and inefficient debugging as problematic areas that require further investigation [START_REF] Li | A State-ofthe-Practice Survey of Risk Management in Development with Off-the-Shelf Software Components[END_REF]; therefore, we stated RQ1.2 and RQ1.3 respectively. Finally, as a previous study [START_REF] Ayala | Selection of Third Party Software in Off-The-Shelf-Based Software Development -An Interview Study with Industrial Practitioners[END_REF] reported that getting OSS components information seems to become a continuous monitoring activity rather than being on a project demand basis, we stated RQ1.4 to understand how integrators monitor OSS communities.

On the other hand, as pointed out in the previous section, company-community relationships have been reported before (e.g., [START_REF] Dahlander | Relationships between open source software companies and communities: observations from Nordic firms[END_REF][START_REF] Dahlander | How do firms make use of open source communities?[END_REF][START_REF] Capra | A Survey on Firms' Participation in Open Source Community Projects[END_REF]), however, there are no sufficiently deep studies to further understand what kind of assistance and/or contributions are mostly requested/provided by integrators, and which means are used to do so. Therefore, RQ2.1, RQ2.2, and RQ2.3 were stated.

RQ1: How do integrators deal with integration issues?

RQ1.1-What are the most relevant integration problems? RQ1.2-How are integration/testing costs estimated? RQ1.3-What are the differences on locating/fixing bespoke software bugs vs. OSS related bugs? RQ1.4-How are OSS communities being followed up?

RQ2:

To what extent integrators interact with/contribute to the community?

RQ2.1-What kind of help do integrators request from the OSS community? RQ2.2-What kind of contributions do integrators provide to the OSS community? RQ2.3-Which means are used to interact with the OSS community?

Research Method

Interviews, observation and analysis of documents are some of the most common data collection methods. However, a stated in [START_REF] Conradi | Reflections on Conducting an International Survey on Software Engineering[END_REF], qualitative (approached by interviews) and quantitative (approached by questionnaires) surveys are the two most relevant types of studies for component-based software engineering investigation.

Thus, as the nature of our research questions was clearly exploratory, we decided to carry out the study using a qualitative research approach based on semi-structured interviews to collect data directly from software-intensive organizations that integrate OSS in software product development. Semi-structured interviews allowed us to have certain flexibility to further explore what was going on in the area.

Participants. Participating organizations were chosen from our direct or indirect industrial collaboration network. They include organizations with different sizes and in different application domains. 69 organizations were invited to participate by phone call and email. Some of the contacts were not eligible for participating due to several reasons, such as lack of integration of OSS components in the projects, or privacy of the OSS adoption strategy. We ended up with 25 integrators from different organizations that represented 25 different projects. Table 1 shows some details of the organizations and the analyzed projects.

The Instrument. The interview guide was carefully designed following the guidelines stated in [START_REF] Oates | Researching Information Systems and Computing[END_REF] and previous experience performing international surveys from several members of the team [START_REF] Conradi | Reflections on Conducting an International Survey on Software Engineering[END_REF], [START_REF] Ayala | Selection of Third Party Software in Off-The-Shelf-Based Software Development -An Interview Study with Industrial Practitioners[END_REF], [14, [15]. The survey was designed as a 5-section survey, with both closed and open questions. The closed questions were used to solicit information about the respondent and project context. The open questions were used to gather information on integration issues and community relationship. The survey also included an introductory section concerning relevant terminology and background in order to offer a common understanding to all participants. In this paper we report our finding related to the relationship among integrators and communities (other results from the study have been also reported in [START_REF] Nguyen | Collaborative Resolution of Requirements Mismatches When Adopting Open Source Components[END_REF]). In general, the guide mostly focused on a single software development project with at least one release of the corresponding software product, and with integration of one or more OSS components. If the respondents had experience with several such projects, they were asked to choose the most familiar one.

Data Collection Procedure: The interview guide was sent to all participants some days before the interview meeting. In this way, they could be prepared for the interview. The participants were asked to fill in the first two parts of the survey and give back to us beforehand. The next three parts of the survey were asked directly to the participant during the interview. Interviews were mainly performed in the mother tongue of the respondents (some exceptions occurred in Norway, where the interviews were performed in English) and when possible face-to-face in their working place or by phone, by one to three researchers of the team. Interviews lasted around 40 to 75 minutes each and were recorded for subsequent analysis. Data Analysis: Interviews were prepared for analysis by the manual transcription of audio records to text documents (the transcripts vary from 13 to 21 pages in size). When needed, a summary of each interview was translated to English so that the whole research team could assess and discuss the data. We analyzed the filled-in questions and transcripts using a qualitative approach that consisted on the assessment of the interview documents by two different researchers and the subsequent generation of categories by grouping sentences or phrases that described the same idea, action or property [START_REF] Oates | Researching Information Systems and Computing[END_REF]. We tried to be exhaustive with the categories in order to include as much detail provided by the respondents as possible.

Results

This section presents the results of the study. They are grouped in 2 subsections according to the research questions introduced above, when possible, we use tables to illustrate the resulting categories.

RQ1: How Do Integrators Deal with Integration Issues?

RQ1.1-What Are the Most Relevant Integration Problems?

Twenty out of 25 respondents did not mention any relevant integration problem in the project they based their answers on. Some of them commented: "We use components that are like standards and with a big community behind, so it is hard that you are the first one that experiences a problem" (K); "In this case, we were lucky. The documentation was complete and updated" (P).

Only five respondents mentioned that they experienced some kind of integration problem. Two of them said that they dropped and changed the OSS component to solve the problem. One emphasizes: "[The potential problems] depend on getting the right component" (X). Two respondents agreed that the problem was solved by learning how other people proceeded in similar cases: "It was a problem related to incompatibility among versions. But, we solve it by searching in Google and finding people that have explained their solution for it" (O); "Yes, we had some problems, but they were already reported by someone else in the forum, so we just learn some tricks to solve it" (R). One respondent stated that the problem came from the lack of documentation "We struggle a little with data formats, because sometimes the documentation was incomplete" (V).

RQ1.2 How Are Integration/Testing Costs Estimated?

On the question about integration/testing costs, sixteen out of 25 respondents agreed that integration costs were estimated based on the experience of the development team. One respondent said: "There is a kind of guessing in this. We ask the development team and with their experience they come with numbers and we put a bill on it" (U). In addition, there were some mixed views on how costly the OSS integration was. One respondent for example thought the cost was low: "It is difficult to say, but in any cases it would be less than developing the component yourself. For the small component, the integration cost is very low anyway because they have a nicer interface…" (G). But another respondent said: "There is normally a lot of costs involved with testing and integration. Lots of money is involved from exchanging part to integrating part. Integration sometimes involves competition with closed systems or exchange with other systems" (Y).

Three respondents pointed out that they used piloting as a way to estimate costs of integration. In these cases the pilot took from one to two months. Two respondents answered that the estimation was part of the preliminary study of the candidate components. In two interviews, respondents said that their organizations had a marketing department responsible for the estimation costs, so the respondents did not know details about such estimation. One respondent stated that their estimation was driven by a testing tool "We used a testing tool. Integration and testing was around 20% of the whole development" (Q). Finally, another integrator stated that they used specific templates for the estimation (T). Table 2 summarizes the obtained categories. We inquired about the differences among bespoke vs. OSS bugs' locating/fixing process. Nine respondents stated that they do not try to locate bugs in the OSS components. One of them commented: "the components we used are like standards. Everything has been proven several times and it is well documented, so we did not find bugs" (K). Nine respondents emphasize that there was no difference on how they located/fixed the bugs. At this respect, one respondent said: "in my experience, most open source libraries and components are well written and the author usually put pride in putting out something that is well commented and nice formatting, and usually it is quite easy to navigate around so; actually, the process is a bit similar" (E). On the other hand, two respondents said that the main difference resides on the fact that it is harder to look at someone else's code. "We run code. If it does not work, we isolate the faulty areas. Then we get to know whether it is in own code or OSS code. It is usually in our own code. It rarely happens that OSS component has errors and they are cumbersome to resolve as we don't know that code"(U). One striking answer was on one respondent stating "It is harder to find bugs in our own code. In the OSS components we didn't have the same amount of bugs than those bugs from us, because they were pretty much stable components. We didn't have to do any formal testing in these OSS components" (F). One respondent stated that an external company was subcontracted to fix those bugs related to the OSS component that were not trivial "When there is a problem that is trivial or small, we try to fix it by our self. When the problem is something different from standard Linux libraries, we have a company to fix. It is a consultant that deals with third party libraries, mismatches…" (D). Finally, 3 respondents did not answer to this question. Table 3 summarizes the resulting categories.

RQ1.4 How Are OSS Communities Being Followed Up?

Fifteen respondents answered that they did not have someone following up with the OSS project. Some of their comments are: "No, only if there is a problem we go to the community" (J); "We don't have anyone watching the update stuff…We don't usually update the OSS component. For instance, now we chose the JBPM version 4.4. We wait sometime until someone realizes that there is a new version, but we don't watch the community" (A).

Eight respondents stated that there was a responsible for OSS component issues. In seven of these eight cases, such a person was a colleague in the organization. One of them commented "Yes, there is a community coordinator who is the one that is the face of a community, and hence he/she follows the trends in this community." One respondent stated that instead of having a dedicated person inside the organization, they subcontracted a company to select the OSS components and support them in any integration issue (D).

Finally, two respondents did not answer this question.

RQ2: To What Extent Integrators Interact With/Contribute to the OSS

Community?

RQ2.1 What Kind of Help Do Integrators Request From the OSS Community?

The analysis of the interviewees' responses regarding the support from the community shows that thirteen respondents did not explicitly request help from the OSS community. Instead, they just used what it was already available on the community portal or managed to solve doubts by consulting their colleagues or using Google. "We did not make any contact extending the normal use of community forums and discussion boards. Most of our issues could be handled by information already available in the community portal" (F).

Ten respondents stated that for some specific aspects, they requested community help and were satisfied with the obtained support: "In a couple of technical aspects, we asked for opinions about what it was the better way to proceed" (P); "[There is] usually a very quick response" (E).

One respondent stated that they started requesting help and became involved in the community so now they are active co-providers: "We were the ones that uploaded this part of the OSS, so we were the ones that better knew such part" (Q). Finally, one respondent stated that asked for help but did not get it (X).

RQ2.2 What Kind of Contributions Do integrators Provide to the Community?

We asked the respondents what kind of contributions they provided to the community. We consolidated their answers as shown in Table 4.

On the one hand, twelve respondents stated that they had reported bugs, but only nine of them eventually contributed by fixing them. Some of their motivations were:

"bug fixing is something we would sent back definitely because we are very interested to give it into the main branch so we don't have to fix it every time we do an update"(H); "It is so much easier to get the bug fixed if you submit the fix of course. And with the open source project you can do that"(C).

On the other hand, twelve respondents stated that they mostly take advantage of the community without contributing: "we have not done anything. We just used the components" (N); "We do not dedicate a budget to OSS bugs notification nor contribution activities" (L). In addition, 4 respondents stated that they became coproviders of the community by contributing back some OSS components.

Finally, five respondents emphasize that they participate in organizations or activities to promote the OSS culture as for instance "We are founding members of Open source foundation" (U), or "We presented our resulting system in Workshops and Seminars to show how integrating OSS components can work" (J).

RQ2.3 Which Means Are Used to Interact With the OSS Community?

Nineteen respondents mentioned that they use to different extent bulletin boards, forums, email lists and the bug tracking system from the community project. Forums and bulletin boards were mentioned the most. However, there were six extreme cases were the respondents did not need any kind of direct interaction with the community: "No cooperation with community. We just downloaded the software" (V). "We did not need to communicate with the community as the components we used were very well documented" (K);"We don't need direct contact with open source projects. We use the product because we have so much competence, either in the team or friendto-friend. So, we don't need to communicate with the community directly" (A); "We mostly read the documentation and things published in the OSS community, but did not collaborate directly. Furthermore, in cases when problems appeared, we used Google to find related hits or portals like StackOverFlow" (M).

Discussion of Main Findings

In this section we discuss the obtained results and establish whenever possible links to the findings of previous studies.

For most of the analyzed projects, integrators did not mention any relevant problem. Although this was an interesting observation, (as integration problems have been highlighted as one of the main concerns of organizations that integrate thirdparty components [START_REF] Li | A State-ofthe-Practice Survey of Risk Management in Development with Off-the-Shelf Software Components[END_REF]), it is important to understand these results in the context of the analyzed projects. In fact, in the analyzed projects, integrators tried to minimize potential integration problems by selecting OSS components that fulfilled an adequate level of documentation/information and/or ensuring that they would have enough (own or subcontracted) expertise to solve the potential problems. Thus, it can be observed from Table 1 that the OSS components used by most of the respondents refer to OSS projects with great activity and vitality. In addition, some of these OSS components have become de facto standards.

It is worth to mention that although some works have claimed that much of the literature does not reflect the huge diversity in OSS initiatives and projects, focusing instead on large, well-established communities. In our case, even if we did not have control over the projects selected by the organizations, we ended up mostly analyzing projects that integrated OSS components from well-established communities as organizations actually use these kinds of components. Thus, we agreed with Choi et al [START_REF] Choi | Managing First Impressions of New Open Source Software Projects[END_REF] that demonstrated that the mature status of well-known OSS projects likely attracts users given their greater activity and vitality. However this pathway is unavailable for most of the OSS projects and those newly initiated projects that struggle to attract users and contributors [START_REF] Capiluppi | Evidences in the Evolution of OS Projects through Changelog Analyses[END_REF]. This also confirms the importance of studies that help OSS communities -especially those newly initiated projects that need to attract users-to envisage strategies for attracting integrators.

Regarding the way bugs were processed, we found, on the one hand, that nine out of 25 respondents do not even try to locate bugs on OSS components; instead, they rely on the expected functionality. On the other hand, other nine respondents emphasized that it was not difference on the way they fixed bugs in their own code instead of fixing bugs from OSS components, mainly because the OSS code was understandable and well commented. In addition, one also said that OSS code is even more understandable than their own code. Most of them also claimed that finding bugs in OSS was not usual. In addition, it was interesting to see that 8 organizations have a responsible of the community trends. This seems to show the importance that the OSS communities are gaining in the organizations.

Regarding costs estimation, we found that most integrators did not further estimate integration costs; instead, they just made an informal approach based on their experience. So, it seems that the claim from Li et al [START_REF] Li | A State-ofthe-Practice Survey of Risk Management in Development with Off-the-Shelf Software Components[END_REF] about the relevance of estimating the time that the component(s) integration takes, do not hold in most of our analyzed projects. Furthermore, in most of the analyzed projects, integrators managed to deal with their integration problems by themselves, without requesting specific help to the community. They mostly used information/documentation already available in the community portal or asked their colleagues for help. In line with this observation, our results also show that forums and bulleting boards from OSS communities were typically used in a passive way (i.e., integrators navigated through documentation and previous posts more than actively participate by adding new posts or content).

It is worth to highlight that the perception of the integrators about the support received from the community was good. 24 out of 25 said that they managed to solve the potential integration problems by using the information available in the portal or requesting help to the community with usually a quick response. Only one case stated that he/she did not receive the expected help.

Regarding the integrator's contribution, our results show that most integrators had limited interaction/contribution to the communities. This confirms the observations from [START_REF] Bonaccorsi | Comparing motivations of individual programmers and firms to take part in the open source movement: from community to business[END_REF][START_REF] Chen | An Empirical Study on Software Development with Open Source Components in the Chinese Software Industry[END_REF][START_REF] Glance | Factors affecting the use of open source software in tertiary education institutions[END_REF][START_REF] Hauge | Adoption of open source in the software industry[END_REF] that emphasize that most organizations seem to have rather limited contributions to the OSS communities. Furthermore, although our results show that the most frequent way to contribute was by providing bug reports without code, the number of integrators that also submitted the code for fixing the bug was also high. This seems to confirm the claim from [START_REF] Robles | Corporate involvement of libre software: study of presence in debian code over time[END_REF] and [START_REF] Aaltonen | Influence in the Linux kernel community[END_REF] regarding that the number of organizations contributing to OSS seems to be increasing. In addition, other ways of contributing that have been usually overlooked by previous research are related to activities to promote the OSS culture by for instance funding OSS initiatives or sharing the knowledge with colleagues.

Regarding the involvement of the approached organizations in terms of the company-community relationships described by Dahlander and Magnusson [START_REF] Dahlander | Relationships between open source software companies and communities: observations from Nordic firms[END_REF], [START_REF] Dahlander | How do firms make use of open source communities?[END_REF] (see section 2), our results show that almost all studied organizations seemed to have a commensalistic relationship with the community (i.e., the organization just benefits from the community). It was interesting to see that 4 out of 25 organizations have become active members of the community as co-providers of some specific parts of the OSS project, thus establishing a symbiotic relationship. Furthermore, a common motivation for those that contributed to the community seemed to be to make sure that modifications to the component's code were maintained, while a common inhibitor to contribute in those organizations that did not contribute was that their budget did not include time neither resources to participate in the communities. These factors have been also mentioned by Ven and Mannaert [START_REF] Ven | Challenges and strategies in the use of open source software by independent software vendors[END_REF]. In addition, most integrators that did not contribute to the communities also mentioned that they try to use the component as is (i.e., without modifications). This agrees with the results stated by Li et al. [START_REF] Li | A State-ofthe-Practice Survey of Risk Management in Development with Off-the-Shelf Software Components[END_REF] that showed evidence that the source code of OSS components is seldom modified, or Höst et al. [START_REF] Höst | Usage of Open Source in Commercial Software Product Development -Findings from a Focus Group Meeting[END_REF] that in a focus group meeting found that practitioners based on their experience do not recommend adapting OSS components that are included in products. However, if they need to adapt them, the recommendation is to do this through "glue code".

Limitations of the Study

This study was performed by means of a rigorous planning and the establishment of protocols for data collection and data analysis. This was especially important as the research involved several researchers and participants from different countries. In addition, the interview guide was carefully designed and piloted to improve its understandability. As a result, some changes in the interviews were done to enhance the elicitation process. Some vocabulary was defined at the beginning of the interview guide to homogenize concepts. Some relevant decisions were taken for approaching a further understanding of the project contexts. One of these was to focus most of the questions of the interview guide on a single product development project so we could further inquire and analyze specific contexts of the projects. This enhanced the value of our analysis and observations. In addition, we sent the interview guide in advance to the respondents so that they could be informed of the kind of questions to be asked. As a result, when performing the study, we rarely experienced respondents having difficulty remembering project details. Furthermore, we explained to the respondents that our study was not focused on analyzing "wrong practices" but on knowing "how integration is done in industrial practice". In several cases we experienced that the interviewer(s) shall skip some questions given time restrictions of the respondent; therefore, some questions results did not cover all participants. Despite this, the results obtained for these questions were valuable as most of the respondents provide their answers. With respect to the data analysis strategy, recording all interviews (and later on transcribing them) contributed to a better understanding and assessment of the data gathered. The generated categories were analyzed, discussed and reviewed by all researchers of the team to ensure their accuracy, understanding and agreement.

Regarding external validity, we addressed several topics in our study. Some of the most relevant ones are listed. First, the companies in this study were selected by a strategy combining convenience and maximum variation sampling from 4 different countries (Spain, Norway, Denmark and Sweden). Second, we had no control over the projects chosen by the respondents. Nevertheless, most of the resulting projects from the participating companies did not cover domains such as real time or life critical requirements neither development for product lines. We are aware that these factors may have an impact on integration, and so we highlight that our findings should not be taken as assertions but also as potential hypotheses that need to be further validated. Thus, we emphasize that our results should not be generalized and might be interpreted with caution, keeping in mind the context from the participating organizations.

Conclusions

We have described the main findings from an exploratory study based on semistructured interviews to integrators from organizations that integrate OSS components in their software products. The study aimed to explore the problems that organizations face when integrating OSS components, and the role that the OSS communities play in such integration processes.

The reported results might be valuable for researchers, organizations and OSS communities that may use the provided evidence to more clearly understand the real OSS integration problems that integrators face and properly align their efforts for facing them.

On the one hand, researchers may get an overview of the state of the practice, identify new research questions, and position and align their own work. On the other hand, organizations may use the provided evidence to understand how other companies integrate OSS and leverage their own integration strategy identifying the practical challenges they might face when doing so. Finally, OSS communities can be informed of the perception of integrators regarding support and to envisage improvements for fostering the collaboration of integrators with the community; this is especially useful for newly initiated OSS communities that usually struggle to attract contributors.

That is, researchers might need to establish new agendas or check potential hypothesis generated by our results. Practitioners might have to adjust processes or methodologies. And OSS communities might have to crate special integration groups or improve integration documentation.

Table 1 .

 1 Some details of the organizations and projects studied

	Id	# Employees	Application Domain	Project Staff	Staff with experience in OSS integration	Some OSS used	% OSS of the system	Total effort (person/ months)
	A	170	Defense (communications)	20-25	30%	JBPM, Jetty, Spring, LogBack, Maven	90% >2000
	B	1	ICT Industry	4	50%	Impact, LPng	10%	480
	C	3	ICT Industry	2	100%	SolR, Xapian, Twisted: NLTK.	80%
	D	350	Embedded systems	18	25%	Linux Kernel, MD5 Checksum	-	-
	E	500	Oil and gas industry	2	50%	PDfLib, OpenPyExcel	77%
	F	-	Public sector	200	60%	Flex Framework, Batch part of Spring	75%	-
	G	230	Bank	4	100%	WideShot, CryptoPP, ParseXs	10%
	H	190	Public sector	20	100%	JBoss, OpenSummer, USD 66%	1000
	I	6	Finance	1.5	66%	Python, Soap and Django	90%	3
	J	4	Public sector (Education)	3	100%	SunGridEngine, Cluster FS, Linux Debian, Ganglia	90%
	K	100	Private services (entertaiment, sales)	3	100%	Apache, MySQL, PHP, FFTP tools	5%	7.5
	L		Public sector	5	100%	Mantis, Ant, Apache	80-90%
	M	150	Public sector (Education)	6	100%	Jasper Reports, DOJO, Apache, Quark	25%	157
	N	30	ICT	7	14%	Jenkins, Cucumber, Mercurial	10%
	O	15	ICT	3	100%	Joomla	50%
	P	5	Public sector	2.5	67%	Zope and Plone	99%	6
	Q	14	ICT	3	100%	Varnish, Engine egg	80%	9
						Jasper Reports, Junit,
	R	500	ICT	25	80%	Jmeter, MediaWiki,	30%	900
						OpenCSV
	S	2	Public sector	2	100%	RXTX, MySQL, Palcom	60%
	T	>1000	ICT	250	50%	OSS platform	50%	1000
	U	11	Energy	2	100%	Speed -Typo3CMS, FPDF, Apache, Stability	40%
	V	2500	ICT	4	100%	Mongo DB	100%	8
	W	4	Whole-sale, retail and entertainment	10	50%	Apache, MySQL, PHP Suite,	100%
	X	1	Public sector (Education)	1	100%	Sbuntu Enterpise Cloud NappIt, pfSense, FreeBSD (UEC) & Eucalyptus,	100%	6
	Y	7	Medical	1	0	Zope, Plone, Apache, Mysql, Ubuntu	100%	3
	(-) respondent did not answer or asked to keep this information confidential.

Table 2 .

 2 Categories of Integration Costs Estimation

	Count Categories
	16 Experience-Based
	3 Did a pilot
	2 In-house marketing department
	2 Preliminary study of the candidate components and their integration problems
	1 Testing tools
	1 Templates
	RQ1

.3 What Are the Differences on Locating/Fixing Bespoke Software Bugs vs. OSS Related Bugs?

Table 3 .

 3 Differences Among Bespoke Software Bugs vs. OSS Bugs

	Count Categories
	9	Do not try to locate OSS bugs
	9	No difference with locating bespoke software bugs
	3	No answer
	2	It is harder to look at someone else code
	1	Subcontract a company to fix OSS components bugs.
	1	It is harder to find bugs in own code

Table 4 .

 4 Results of integrators' contribution to the OSS community

	Answer	Own bug	Bug fixes	Become co-	Promoting the
		reports	with code	providers	OSS culture
	YES	12	9	4	5
	NO	12	15	19	9
	Unknown/no answer	1	1	1	10

Acknowledgments

We thank all people that participated in piloting an early version of the interview guide and the interview participants who took time from their workdays to participate in our interviews. This work has been partly supported by the Spanish project TIN2010-19130-C02-01, and the Industrial Excellence Center EASE -Embedded Applications Software Engineering, (http://ease.cs.lth.se).

Jyoti Nandrajog contributed to the interview part of this study in Denmark.


Tanya Percy
email: tbpercy@gmail.com

Jean-Paul Van Belle

Exploring the Barriers And Enablers to the Use of Open Educational Resources by University Academics in Africa

Keywords: Social software e, g, wikis, H2O

Considerable effort has gone into Open Educational Resource (OER) initiatives in the past decade. These initiatives have created free, high quality educational resources for everyone and anyone to use. However, these open and free resources appear to remain largely unused by university academics on the educationally resource-poor African continent. The objectives of the research study are to explore the inhibitors and enablers are experienced by academics that use OER, and what barriers prevent academics from using OER. The sample consists of academics from East, West and Southern Africa. Information was gathered by means of a survey questionnaire. A modified version of the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology model was used to identify the influence of certain factors on a user's intention to adopt OER. Some of the key findings indicate that Performance Expectancy and Effort Expectancy have a positive effect on a user's Behavioural Intention to use OER, and the latter has a strong influence on the Actual Use of OER. Facilitating Conditions do not have a statistically significant impact. Additionally, significant differences were found in the barriers which users and potential users of OER have identified as either limiting their current use of OER, or negatively affecting their intention to use OER. These barriers include discovery, relevance, context and individual resources. Addressing these factors could lead to a more widespread adoption of Open Educational Resources in Africa and, consequently, more pervasive and higher quality educational opportunities.

Tanya Percy1 and Jean-Paul Van Belle2

.

Considerable effort has gone into Open Educational Resource initiatives in the past decade. These initiatives have created free, high quality educational resources for everyone and anyone to use. However, even though these resources are open and free, it is not evident that these resources are being used by university academics on the relatively resource-poor African continent. This research study explores this question from an African academic's viewpoint. The objectives of the research study are to explore what barriers and enablers academics who use OER have experienced, and what barriers prevent academics from consuming OER.

Exploring the Barriers And Enablers to the Use of Open Educational Resources by

 illustrates the range of resources that are typically included under OER.

Introduction

Education is seen as a basic human right which is central to the sustainable development of countries. However, this right is dependent on the relevant infrastructure being in place [START_REF] Geith | Access to education with online learning and open educational resources: Can they close the gap[END_REF]. This could include anything from content repositories to bandwidth to the removal of any barriers which prevent accessibility to educational resources. The open education movement has been identified as a possible enabler of the educational shift from a teacher-centric model, where the educator is seen as the dispenser of knowledge, to a competency, learner-centred educational model (Geser, 2007). Making Open Educational Resources (OER) more accessible could reduce the social inequalities which exist in developing countries [START_REF] Mora | Open Educational resources and the evolving value chain of education in developing countries[END_REF]. It could provide a means of bypassing the educational barriers of economy, demographics and geography (Petrides, Nguyen, Jimes, & 2 Literature Review

What Are Open Educational Resources (OER)?

The term "Open Educational Resources" (OER) was first described at a UNESCO forum in 2002 as "the open provision of educational resources, enabled by information and communication technologies, for consultation, use and adaptation by a community of users for non-commercial purposes" (Friesen, 2009, p.1). Perhaps a more descriptive definition is: "digitized educational resources that are freely available for use by educators and learners, without an accompanying need to pay royalties or license fees. The digitized resources may be shared via the Internet or using media such as disk-drives. OER are usually, not exclusively, licensed using a Creative Commons license. Both the original owners of the material and the subsequent users need to clearly understand the terms of these contracts to appreciate the ways in which the materials may be remixed and shared." (West & Victor, 2011, p.9). The latter definition highlights the key attributes of Open Educational Resources:

Educational resources should be in a digitized form. This indicates that educational resources should be made available on the internet or via another form of digitized media so that material is easier to distribute and reuse with the least cost. This is supported by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), as their definition of OER is "digitised materials offered freely and openly to educators, students and self-learners to use and reuse for teaching, learning and research" (Mora et al., 2008 , p.1). Additionally, the tools which are used to support open educational initiatives must be open source in nature, where the source code is available for use (Geser, 2007).

Educational resources should be free and open to use. This allows users to collaborate, improve upon and share educational content and make the content more freely available and open to a global community (Petrides et al., 2008) under a licensing agreement, namely the creative commons license.

Educational resources should be easily remixed and shared. OER content can be applicable to one user but not applicable to another [START_REF] Koohang | Advancing Sustainability of Open Educational Resources[END_REF]. It is important that the content may be edited and versioned to the needs of the educator, learner or institution. [START_REF] West | Background and action paper on OER[END_REF] define Open Educational Resources as digitized educational material which

Benefits of Using OER

Many advantages for using Open Educational Resources have been identified [START_REF] D'antoni | Open Educational Resources: reviewing initiatives and issues[END_REF]. Educators have the option to download information as a supplement to the educators' coursework, and the ability to version and localize the content for their own use [START_REF] Gourley | Re-invigorating openness at The Open University: the role of Open Educational Resources[END_REF]. Through the localizing of existing content, they can save time as copyright concerns would have already been resolved, and they do not need to produce content from scratch (Geser, 2007). Educators can be exposed to what colleagues are doing, and through observing others teaching practices, their own teaching can be improved [START_REF] Hilton | The Creation and Use of Open Educational Resources in Christian Higher Education[END_REF]. Additionally, educators can provide their own comments on the educational material, by giving insight on how the content can be improved, and the lessons learnt through their sharing of the information (Geser, 2007).

It is through the use of Open Educational Resources that educators are encouraged to share materials and their ideas with other educators [START_REF] Gourley | Re-invigorating openness at The Open University: the role of Open Educational Resources[END_REF]. Through this sharing of educational resources, which is core to academic values, educators encourage the development and support of new knowledge societies and, through such initiatives, the educators' reputation may be improved [START_REF] D'antoni | Open Educational Resources: reviewing initiatives and issues[END_REF]. In a broader context, OER aims to make the best ideas available to those who want to use them and, additionally, empowers individuals to make use of alternative education avenues beyond those provided by the traditional education system (D'Antoni, 2009) e.g. e-learning and Open CourseWare [OCW] repositories.

Enablers and Barriers to the use of OER

The main enablers and barriers identified in the literature can be grouped under the following themes: technology; copyright; politics and culture; communities of practice; quality; and discovery, context and relevance.

Technology

As OER are digital by nature, they require that the basic Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure be in place in order to enable access to the localization and adoption of OER content. However, since basic ICT infrastructure often does not exist in developing countries (Stacey, 2007), technological barriers, such as the lack of access to modern computers and the internet, still prove to be barriers to the use of OER. Less than 10% of the population in South Africa has access to the internet; this figure is still lower in countries like Kenya, Nigeria and Tanzania (Wilson, 2008). Bandwidth is another issue (Stacey, 2007). By making OER content available through web-based interfaces, technology has assisted in bypassing the barrier of interoperability and in making OER more accessible [START_REF] Atkins | Resources (OER) Movement:Achievements, Challenges, and New Opportunities[END_REF]. Their lack of skills in the technology inhibited educators from using the OER portal due to the amount of time it would take to learn the technology before content could be produced or edited (Petrides et al., 2008). Where users had experience in producing and editing content on the technology platform, the level of use and reuse was high. To achieve this, however, educators need to be trained in the creation, use and reuse of learning materials [START_REF] Panke | An Expert Survey on the Barriers and Enablers of Open Educational Practices[END_REF].

Comment facilities on open content portals assisted users in producing or editing content (Petrides et al., 2008), as it was not completely new and daunting.

Copyright

Educators were concerned that copyright claims may be laid against them for the use or reuse of material where the author of the material had not granted the necessary permissions [START_REF] Davis | Bootstrapping a Culture of Sharing to Facilitate Open Educational Resources[END_REF]. To counter these copyright concerns, a licensing system called the Creative Commons (CC) was established by Larry Lessig andothers in 2001(Wiley &Gurrell, 2009).

The CC licensing framework allows individuals and organizations to publish their work [START_REF] West | Background and action paper on OER[END_REF] under different types of Intellectual Property licenses [START_REF] Kozinska | Are open educational resources the future of e-learning? 3rd International Future-Learning[END_REF]. Additional flexibility of the framework allows authors to customize the license according to their requirements [START_REF] Geith | Access to education with online learning and open educational resources: Can they close the gap[END_REF]. Thus when potential users see the Creative Commons license, which changed the "all rights reserved" to "some rights reserved open licensing" (Gourley & Lane, 2009, p.58), they know that the educational content is open and freely available for use [START_REF] West | Background and action paper on OER[END_REF]. However, the use of Creative Commons licensing is subject to some debate, especially the "commercial" and "non-commercial" license options (Joyce, 2007;[START_REF] Bissell | Permission granted: open licensing for educational resources[END_REF]. Additionally, licensing can become a point of confusion where content is mixed from different sources. If one content source is registered under the non-commercial ShareAlike license and the other under the attribution ShareAlike license, a derivative of the original material cannot be used as the original licenses are incompatible (Wiley & Gurrell, 2009).

Exploring the Barriers And Enablers to the Use of Open Educational Resources by University Academics in Africa 5

Politics and culture

The right to education is currently more of an attainable goal in the developed, wealthier countries, whose aim is more on secondary education than it is in the poorer developing countries, whose aim is mainly primary education [START_REF] Kozinska | Are open educational resources the future of e-learning? 3rd International Future-Learning[END_REF]. Political, social and economic factors influence accessibility to information and communication technologies (ICT) [START_REF] Mora | Open Educational resources and the evolving value chain of education in developing countries[END_REF]. Developing countries have additional barriers which exist, to a lesser extent, in developed countries. Of the open education content produced by developed countries, a large amount is in English and is based on Western Culture. This in itself could pose a large barrier to the adoption and use of open content in non-English speaking developing countries which may have fewer resources for translating materials [START_REF] Mora | Open Educational resources and the evolving value chain of education in developing countries[END_REF]. However, as the OER movement gains momentum and more organizations join the fray, the amount of OER content which has been translated has increased [START_REF] Geith | Access to education with online learning and open educational resources: Can they close the gap[END_REF]. Although potential cultural issues have also been mentioned [START_REF] Mora | Open Educational resources and the evolving value chain of education in developing countries[END_REF], no actual supporting evidence has been provided for this barrier.

Community of Practice

The concept of "build it and they will come" (Hatakka, 2009, p.1) does not apply to open educational initiatives. In order for individuals to use Open Educational Resources, they have to feel part of the process and experience a sense of belonging (Windle, Wharrad, McCormick, Laverty, & Taylor, 2010). This can be achieved through communities of practice.

There appears to be a correlation between the author group size and reuse of OER initiatives (Petrides et al., 2008). The size of an author group, and resultant collaboration between authors, increases the chance of reuse of OER initiatives (Petrides et al., 2008). These author groups can also be referred to as communities of practice.

Communities of practice can be seen as vehicles to improving the scalability of OER, as the members share a common interest or goal, in producing and sharing knowledge. The members have the freedom to join or leave the community, and to provide a mixed bag of different skills and experiences which, when combined, can create scalable OER [START_REF] Koohang | Advancing Sustainability of Open Educational Resources[END_REF].

A good example of a community of practice is the OpenCourseWare consortium which, by creating "a broad and deep body of open educational content using a shared model" (Friesen, 2009, p.10), provided institutions with the facility to apply the MIT model to their own courses. Wikipedia is another example where the Wikipedia community has assisted in improving the overall quality of content, through collaboration and redevelopment of content (Petrides et al., 2008). The Hewlett Foundation, a funding body for OER initiatives, is focusing on a community building model which will provide incentives to all the stakeholders, and will encourage a "culture of contribution" (Atkins et al., 2007, p.3). Tanya Percy1 and Jean-Paul Van Belle2

Quality

With the increase in the amount of OER content being shared, quality and quality assurance have been raised as major concerns [START_REF] Kozinska | Are open educational resources the future of e-learning? 3rd International Future-Learning[END_REF]. The term "quality" in itself is an issue, as quality can also be associated with the context within which it is used, and a sense of quality can only be gained once an individual forms a relationship with the material (Wiley & Gurrell, 2009). Iiyoshi and Kumar (2008) support this by saying that, in order to be able to evaluate the quality of content, it needs to be understood by whom the information will be used, how it will be used and when it will be used. For example, if a resource is written in Spanish but used by an individual who speaks Chinese, then the content would not be seen as high-quality material for that individual.

OER is open and free, which makes it more easily available to individuals to use; however, the term "free" is often incorrectly associated with poor quality [START_REF] Panke | An Expert Survey on the Barriers and Enablers of Open Educational Practices[END_REF]. The Open Source Software movement was originally seen in the same light. When the concept of "free software" originally arose, questions were raised about its quality (Wiley & Gurrell, 2009). However, free and open software (FOSS) products have seen great successes, the openness associated with this software movement, has only increased the quality of the product.

Discovery, Relevance and Context

Finding resources on the World-Wide Web can be difficult due to the enormous amount of content available [START_REF] Panke | An Expert Survey on the Barriers and Enablers of Open Educational Practices[END_REF], and due to the lack of useful metadata. OER metadata is important in providing detail around the resource. For example, if an educator is searching for a video on a particular topic, but the video has to be viewed in order to decide its relevance, the educator would soon give up, as to review the entire video to determine its relevance would take too long (Wenk, 2010). Contextual information is also important in order for the educator to decide resource relevance. For example, what was the feedback from learners who used this information, and was the quality of the content deemed to be of a high standard [START_REF] Davis | Bootstrapping a Culture of Sharing to Facilitate Open Educational Resources[END_REF]? Some initiatives have been started to assist in overcoming these issues. For instance, the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) has provided a Google search called the Commonwealth of Learning's Knowledge Finder (Open Educational Resource, 2005) which can be used on any website to assist with the search for relevant OER material [START_REF] Panke | An Expert Survey on the Barriers and Enablers of Open Educational Practices[END_REF]. This tool can be found at http://www.col.org/resources/knowServices/Pages/kf.asp. [START_REF] West | Background and action paper on OER[END_REF] identified that often the educational material is based on outdated educational design principles, and to update the material will burden the already overtaxed lecturers. When educators try to use the online learning content for their lectures, there may be issues if the content is not organized into smaller more manageable modules which can easily be mixed and combined to form learning content which matches that of the institution's course curriculum [START_REF] Johnstone | Open Educational Resources Serve the World[END_REF].

Research Methodology

Currently there is very little research around the use of Open Educational Resources by the academic community specifically within an African context. Additionally, the focus of most OER research is still on the development and publication of OER repositories and on establishing policies around the creation and use of OER material [START_REF] Andrade | Beyond OER: Shifting Focus to Open Educational Practices[END_REF]. By contrast, this research aims to identify the actual level of use of OER by academics in Africa, and to explain the factors which influence an academic's individual use of Open Educational Resources. The researchers adopted a positivist research philosophy.

Research Model

Through the critical literature review, the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) model was determined to be applicable to this research. The UTAUT model was developed through the analyses of elements across eight models (Venkatesh, Morris, Davis & Davis, 2003). There are four core independent constructs or determinants of intention and use: Performance Expectancy, Effort Expectancy, Social Influence and Facilitating Conditions (Venkatesh et al., 2003). These four constructs have been used along with two additional constructs: Attitude toward Using Technology and Information Quality. Although these constructs have traditionally not had much influence on behavioural intention to adopt various types of information technologies (Venkatesh et al., 2003), the researchers thought it prudent to include them given the nature of the research question (quality was identified as an important attribute of educational resources) and the resource constraints faced by African academics (and students). The overall reaction to using OER.

Information Quality Q The extent to which believes that the quality of the content of the OER is sufficiently high for use in their courses.

Research Design

The target population includes academics in higher education institutions in Africa. The original population group was divided into the following strata: region, institution type and faculty. The regional strata were restricted to the English speaking regions of the African continent, namely South, East and West Africa. Within each of these regions higher educational institutions were identified and, to ensure that the barriers and enablers were adequately researched, the faculty strata covered both global and local content. The disciplines of Information Systems, Science and Mathematics were selected to ensure that the population group included areas where content can be used globally, as there is not much differentiation between local and global curricula. From a localized content perspective, the disciplines of Social Sciences and Humanities were incorporated into the research. The actual sampling approach was convenience sampling, as it was identified that the responses would not be essentially or critically different across the different stratification dimensions, and there was "little variation in the population group" (Saunders et.al, 2009, p.41).

The site used to gather information was the University Directory Worldwide (http://www.university-directory.eu/index.html) website, which provided a breakdown of universities by country. Some countries were omitted due to political tensions at the time of the survey or because insufficient academic contact data was publicly available.

Given the large geographic spread of the population of African academics, a survey was deemed to be the most appropriate data collection method. Apart from the demographic section, the questionnaire used the same items from previous surveys, as these were considered to be valid and reliable.

A total of 693 surveys were emailed to academics. 11 participants opted out of the survey, and 53 emails were undelivered. The total number of responses which could have been received was 629. The total number of participants who started the survey was 96. Although most completed the demographic questions, only 68 respondents completed the entire questionnaire. Of those who responded but did not complete the survey, the following reasons were provided: "I […] am absolutely flooded at the moment"; "it has been very hectic for me", "I had problem with internet access."

Exploring the Barriers And Enablers to the Use of Open Educational Resources by

University Academics in Africa 9

Data Analysis

The quantitative data has been analysed using quantitative analysis techniques including graphs and statistics. The analysis has assisted in exploring the data, and has identified trends and relationships within the data

Sample Demographics

Respondents were well spread between the English-speaking African regions West Africa (27%), East Africa (28%) and Southern Africa (41%). There were also three respondents indicating that they were from North (2) or Central Africa (1).

Respondents were predominantly male with males accounting for 75% of the final data sample. However, this is representative of the target population of African academics since it corresponds quite closely with the original mailing list where the percentage of males varied from 87% (West Africa) to 72% (Southern Africa). Most respondents were in their thirties (35%) or forties (32%). Encouragingly, there were also quite a few young academic respondents (18% in their twenties) but only 10 (15%) of the academics older than 50. Almost one third (32.4%) had 5 years or less of lecturing experience with a further 31% from 6-10 years. Only 15% had more than 20 years' experience.

There was also a good spread among faculties or disciplines: 29% were in information technology, 25% in the social sciences, 16% in science, 13% in the humanities, 12% in mathematics and only 4% from engineering. The majority of the respondents held the position of lecturer (53%) or senior lecturer (19%) while only 17% fell into a professorial category.

Descriptive Analysis and Implications

Firstly, the number of respondents which are users and non-users of OER was examined. The option in the questionnaire included a scale of use, from yes to some extent to a great extent. For the descriptive analysis, a breakdown of both the scale and the overall yes/no response will be analysed for completeness. Table 2 shows that the majority of the respondents are users of OER. However, this is unlikely to be representative of the larger academic population in Africa due to response bias: academics that are using OER can be assumed to be much more inclined to respond to the survey than the non-users.

UTAUT Model

This section tests the modified Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) model regarding the factors which influence the Behavioural Intention to use (BI) and the actual Use Behaviour (UB) of Open Educational Resources.

Validity and Reliability Tests

The first step before performing any tests to support the UTAUT model is to ensure that the data used to support the model is both valid and reliable. In order to confirm this, a factor analysis and Cronbach Alpha test was performed on the data. The factor analysis is used to produce a matrix of the data, and assists in identifying correlations in the data which in turn are grouped into factors (Cairns, Oshlyansky & Thimbleby (2007). This factor analysis has identified what questions have strong loadings to each other.

The initial factor analysis consisted of 6 factors, with a loading factor of .6 which is acceptable in the exploratory nature of this research study. However, the test items related to the constructs of attitude and information quality did not load clearly on distinct factors in the factor analysis tests and thus the model was reduced to the original UTAUT independent constructs, namely Performance Expectancy (PE), Effort Expectancy (EE), Social Influence (SI) and Facilitating Conditions (FC). Table 3 shows the factor loadings for the final model. Not all test items loaded fully on the remaining constructs and those were also removed for further analysis.

Table 3. Factor loadings for final test items on the four factors.

Since multiple item constructs were used, it is important to test the reliability of the constructs (Hong, Im & Kang, 2010). The common test for this is the Cronbach alpha test. The Cronbach's Alpha coefficients were high, ranging from 0.766 (UB) to 0.894 (EE), except for the Facilitating Conditions (FC) construct which had a Cronbach α score of .678. However, this was considered acceptable given the small sample size.

Data Analysis and Implications

The UTAUT model is used to analyze the direct determinants of a user's intention to use a technology and their usage behaviour (Venkatesh, Morris, Davis & Davis, 2003).

To support the UTAUT model, the independent variables of Performance Expectancy (PE), Effort Expectancy (EE) and Social Influence (SI) were analysed to identify if they had a positive or negative effect on the dependent variable Behavioural Intention (BI). Additionally, the independent variable Facilitating Conditions (FC) was analysed to identify if there was a positive or negative correlation between FC and Usage Behaviour (UB).

The most important relationships of the UTAUT model are those relationships between the independent constructs of PE and EE, to the use intention (Hong, Im & Kang, 2010). It needs to be noted that the scores for each construct were weighted prior to any data analysis.

Performance Expectancy was used to determine how much an individual believed that a certain technology would assist them in performing better in their job. 87.9% of the responses to the questions concerning Performance Expectancy gave a rating of agree somewhat to strongly agree. This implies that OER adds both value and quality to academics' teaching, thereby improving their overall job performance. The correlation between PE and BI was statistically significant (p < 0.05).

Tanya Percy1 and Jean-Paul Van Belle2

The questions for the EE construct are focused on what the population perceived as the expected effort required in using OER. If the effort required in adopting a technology is high, then the chances of those individuals adopting the relevant technology will be low, and vice versa. 55% of the participants agreed that OER is easy to format and mix, 24% were undecided and, of the remainder, 10.59% disagree. Even though the majority agreed that they expected there wouldl be little expected effort required to adopt OER, large portions of the population were undecided or disagreed with the questions. Detailed analysis indicates that it is the nonusers who were undecided about the amount of effort required to use OER, as 46% of them selected the undecided option. This could be indicative of their lack of experience and or exposure to OER, and to their resultant uncertainty about how much effort would be required to adopt OER. There is a statistically significant correlation between EE and BI (p<0.05).

The Social Influence construct focused on the influence which other individuals had on the participant's intention to use OER. The two questions which make up this construct are on faculty members' influence and on the fear of criticism from others if the participant used OER. The majority of the participants disagreed with these questions, indicating that academics are not influenced to any great extent by others. Additionally, the Pearson correlation coefficient between SI and BI is too low to be significantly significant. Out of the four constructs of PE, EE, SI and FC, SI has the least impact on an individual's intention to use OER.

The facilitating conditions construct identifies whether participants have access to resources or have the knowledge to use or find OER. As per the UTAUT model, it is identified that facilitation conditions influence the Use Behaviour of an individual but not the individual's intention to use OER. However, in this research study, Facilitating Conditions were positively and statistically significantly correlated to both an individual's Behavioural Intention and their Use Behaviour towards OER.

The Behavioural Intention construct focuses on the user's intention to use OER, and is a dependent construct in our model. The responses for these test items (Table 4) confirm the "use" responses shown earlier (Table 2). The multiple regression analysis (Table5) for the dependent variable BI shows an overall R 2 score of 0.53. This indicates that 53 % of the variance in the Behavioural Intention to adopt OER is explained by the three constructs Performance Expectancy, Social Influence and Effort Expectancy. However, SI is not a significant predictor (p = 0.171) when the other two significant variables are taken into account. For the dependent variable UB, the overall R 2 score was 0.51 (Table 6). This indicates that 51% of the variance in UB can be explained. However, the direct impact of Facilitating Conditions is not statistically significant when BI's contribution is taken into account. Figure 4 shows the overall correlations between the independent and dependent constructs using the Beta coefficients from the multiple regression tests.

Perceived Barriers to the Adoption of OER

In a manner, this reduces the final validated model back to the original parsimonious Technology Acceptance Model, where Performance Expectancy can be seen to represent Perceived Usefulness, and Effort Expectancy as a proxy for Ease of Use.

The second objective of this research was to analyze the perceived barriers to the use of OER. Respondents were requested to select multiple options which they perceived to be barriers to using Open Educational Resources. The resultant selected barriers from the survey questionnaire were grouped into the six main themes identified earlier in the literature review. Where the data did not fit into the predetermined groupings, a new barrier grouping was created.

The cumulative score per barrier grouping was calculated to identify the highest perceived barriers to the use of OER by academics (figure 5). The two most crucial barriers appear to be the technological barrieras previously identified by Stacey (2007)and the difficulties experienced in discovering OER and assessing their relevance and context. Also important are the lack of individual resources (time and personal skills) and the perceived quality of OER.

The barriers were also compared between users and non-users of OER, to identify whether the overall barriers experienced by users and non-users are the same. A Chi-square analysis confirmed that there were statistically significant differences between the two groups of academics (p = 0.0028). The main contributor to the significant difference was the lack of individual resources (which was rated as the most critical barrier for the non-users), although users rated the difficulty in discovering and assessing their relevance/context also significantly higher than the non-users.

Note that, although the political and cultural barrier was not identified as being significant in this research, there were perhaps insufficient questions around what political or cultural barriers the academic population could experience within an African context. Future research should look at this barrier on its own within the academic OER context, in order to identify whether the political and cultural barriers effect the adoption of OER within Africa as compared to developed countries. Additionally, local legal and organisational circumstances may have constrained academics from adopting OER, e.g. where they cannot change the curriculum.

Conclusion

The research has identified that academics' attitudes towards OER is positive as the majority of the respondents agree that OER can add value to their work as an academic. Interestingly, only two of the UTAUT model influencing variables were found to exert significant influence on the academics' intention to adopt OER: the Performance Expectancy i.e. the degree to which OER are expected to add value to their work, and Effort Expectancy, the amount of work they expect to have to do to obtain and use OER. In effect, these findings reduce the model to the original, more parsimonious Technology Acceptance Model which was the foundation of the UTAUT model, where (Perceived) Usability and Usefulness were hypothesized to be the key drivers of Behavioural Intention. However, these two variables explained more than half of the variance in Behavioural Intention to Use OERs, and the latter also explained over half the variance in OER Use Behaviour.

Another aim of this research study was to identify the main barriers to the use of Open Educational Resources by academics within Africa. The main barriers identified are those of technology, discovery, relevance, quality and individual resources.

The key barrier experienced by the respondents is that of technology i.e. lack of access to computers, lack of internet access and/or poor bandwidth. Although these issues have been identified in prior research, the confirmation of these findings adds more urgency to the need to find solutions to the poor technological infrastructure which exists in developing countries.

A more unexpected finding is that OER users rated the difficulty of both discovering what Open Educational Resources are available to use and determining their relevance to their environmental context or subject area as equally critical barriers. Interestingly, the expected barrier of Western context or bias, considering most of the published OER material originates from developed countries, was not seen as a significant barrier.

Recommendations

One of the questions in the survey questionnaire was for academics to comment on what would encourage them to use OER. Some of the underlying themes were communication, advertising, training and awareness.

The recommendation to the OER community is to market and advertise OER to the African academic community. It will improve academics' awareness of what is available and what benefits can be gained through using OER. This may address the key barrier of discovery, relevance and context, since, even though there have been improvements in the search facilities and repositories of OER content, these changes have not been communicated effectively to the greater African academic community.

From a skills perspective, academics believe that gaining access to and using OER is complicated, and that individuals need to be trained in the necessary skills required to use OER. Although this point does have some merit for individuals without a basic level of computer literacy, there needs to be better communication around which OER repositories exist and the ease with which Open Educational Resources can be accessed.

Fig 1 .

 1 Fig 1. Types of Open Educational Resources (Margulies, 2005)

Fig 2 .

 2 Fig 2. Amended research model based on UTAUT with two additional constructs.

Fig 3 .

 3 Fig 3. Type of OER material used by respondents.

Fig 4 .

 4 Fig 4. Correlations between model constructs (* = significant at p<0.05)

Fig 5 .

 5 Fig 5. Perceived barriers to the adoption of OER.

Expectancy Actual Use of OER Social Influence Effort Expectancy Intention to Use OER Facilitating Conditions Information Quality AttitudeTable 1 .

 1 The independent variables are described in table 1 below. Explanation of the independent variables used in the research model

	Performance Expectancy Effort Expectancy Social Influence Facilitating Conditions technology Performance Construct Attitude towards	Code PE EE SI FC A	Description How much the academic believes that OER will assist them in performing better in their job. How easy it is to access and use OER. The extent to which academics are affected by people within their circle of influence e.g. colleagues or friends. The extent to which an academic believes that there are adequate resources i.e. technical infrastructure to support their use of OER.

Table 2 .

 2 Use of OER by survey respondents.Also of interest is what type of Open EducationalResources the sample population is accessing the most. As identified in Figure3, lecture notes and presentations are the most widely used OER.

		Frequency	Proportion
	No, not at all	15	20.0%
	Yes, to a limited extent	31	41.3%
	Yes, to some extent	21	28.0%
	Yes, to a great extent	8	10.7%
	Total	75	100.0%

Table 4 .

 4 Behavioural intention to use OER. Behavioural Intention (BI) and Use Behaviour (UB). A multiple regression test was done in order to estimate the strength of relationships between the dependent and independent constructs.Exploring the Barriers And Enablers to the Use of Open Educational Resources byUniversity Academics in Africa 13

		Agree	Agree Agree	Un-	Disagree	Dis-	Dis-
		strong-		some-	decid	some-	agree	agree
		ly		what	ed	what		strongly
	OER fits the way I work	10%	35%	29%	18%	3%	1%	3%
	Will use OER in future	21%	44%	24%	10%	1%	0%	0%
	Will use OER in next 2 years	10%	41%	24%	15%	3%	3%	4%
	Would join OER community	7%	32%	25%	21%	1%	9%	4%
	Use behaviour was measured by 7 test items. A statistically significant and positive
	correlation exists between

Table 5 .

 5 Multiple regression summary for Behavioural Intention to Use OER.

		b*	Std.Err.	b	Std.Err.	t(64)	p-value
	Intercept			0.0980	0.1138	0.8604	0.3928
	Performance Expectancy (PE)	0.5060	0.1015	1.2302	0.2468	4.9853	0.0000*
	Social Influence (SI)	0.1249	0.0903	0.0475	0.0343	1.3836	0.1713
	Effort Expectancy (EE)	0.3018	0.0989	0.1215	0.0398	3.0527	0.0033*
	R 2 =0.5280; Adjusted R 2 =0.5059; F(3,64)=23.866; p<0.00000; Std.Err of estimate: 0.1778

Table 6 .

 6 Multiple regression summary for Use Behaviour of OER.

		b*	Std.Err.	b	Std.Err.	t(64)	p-value
	Intercept			0.1360	0.0415	3.2763	0.0047*
	Behavioural Intention (BI)	0.7315	0.0959	0.3659	0.0480	7.6300	0.0000*
	Facilitating Conditions	-0.0400	0.0959	-0.0146	0.0350	-0.1475	0.6777
	R 2 =0.7153; Adjusted R 2 =0.5117; F(2,65)=34.052; p<0.00000; Std.Err of estimate: 0.0897

Future Research

The sample was fairly small and there is a strong suspected response bias towards respondents that are familiar with and have used OER. A larger scale and more systematic survey would be more representative of the African academic community. In particular, future research should attempt to include academics from the Arabic and French-language North and West African regions. OER research in other developing countries could compare both the model fit and barriers and possibly highlight those factors that are more uniquely African.

Future research could also examine the barriers to OER adoption in more detail. A larger sample is likely to reveal additional significant influencing factors beyond Effort and Performance Expectancy.

In particular, the barriers of culture and politics were not investigated to a great enough extent in this research. In order to determine whether politics and culture (or other factors) have a significant impact on an individual's adoption and use of OER, a qualitative study could be completed for academics within Africa, in order for the underlying feelings and attitudes towards culture and politics to be understood.