The Organic.Edunet portal provides open access to educational resources on organic agriculture. It has over 11,000 resources, 3,500 registered users, and receives over 150,000 unique visitors annually from over 200 countries. Usage statistics show the highest traffic comes from regions where English, Spanish, and French (the supported languages) are spoken. Users from non-supported language regions had much lower usage. The portal's multilingual support increases user activity and behavior within the portal. English is the primary language used for queries both on web searches and within the portal.

1. Using Agricultural Learning Portals in
Developing Countries:
The Case of Organic.Edunet
Vassilis Protonotarios 1,2
Giannis Stoitsis 1
Salvador Sanchez-Alonso1
Kostas Kastrantas2
David Martin-Moncunill1

2. About the Organic.Edunet Web portal

3. Organic.Edunet Web portal
• An open learning portal providing access to
almost 11,000 quality digital resources on
Organic Agriculture, Agroecology and other
green topics
• has more than 3,500 registered users
• features a multilingual user interface
• content can be retrieved using 4 different
search mechanisms

5. now some statistics…*
 3486 registered users
 almost 11.000 available resources
 11 institutional collections so far
 More than 188.000 visits and 548.000 page
views from 202 countries
 More than 156.000 unique visitors
 83,2% new visitors
*01/01/2010 -15/06/2013

6. and some more statistics…*
*01/01/2010 -15/06/2013
We are missing visits only from
countries in white color!

7. Revised version of the portal
(currently in beta)

8. Multilinguality in the Organic.Edunet
Web portal

9. Multilinguality in Organic.Edunet
• Current status:
– Metadata available in 17 languages
– Metadata for each resource in up to 8 languages
– Resources available in 11 languages
– User interface available in 17 languages
• All these translations were manually provided
by project partners and stakeholders.

10. Multilinguality in Organic.Edunet
• Organic.Lingua project: www.organic-
lingua.eu
– aims to enhance the Organic.Edunet portal with
multilinguality options:
• Automatic translation tools
• User-generated content, including translations of
existing metadata records in new languages
• New collections with content in new languages (not
existing in Organic.Edunet)
• Facilitation of translation of metadata and ontology

11. The use of the portal in developing
countries

12. Definition of developing countries
• According to the International Statistical
Institute: “Countries with a Gross National
Income of US$ 11,905 and less in 2010 are
defined as
developing”
Source: Wikipedia

13. Regions including developing countries
1. Latin America & Caribbean
2. Northern Africa
3. Southern Africa
4. Eastern Africa
5. Western Africa
6. Southern Asia
7. Southeastern Asia
8. East Asia

14. Developing countries per region

15. Methodology

16. Methodology
• Data sources:
– Mainly the web portal log files
– Google Analytics
• Due to wealth of available data, we focused
on regions instead of individual countries
– Data on individual countries per region were
analyzed and aggregated

17. Indicators studied
Variable Description
Visits (per day)
Visits per day for countries with full, partial (only interface), and
no language support
Bounces (per day)
Bounces per day for countries with full language, partial, and no
language support
Page views (per day)
Page views per day for countries with full language, partial, and
no language support
Unique visitors (per day)
Unique visitors per day for countries with full, partial, and no
language support
Average time on site (per visit)
Average time on site for users from countries with full, partial,
and no language support
Average time on page (per visit)
Average time on page for users from countries with full, partial,
and no language support
Page views (per visit)
Number of pages per visit from countries with full, partial, and no
language support
Visits from search engines Number of visits from search engines for each language
Search depth
Average number of pages that users view after using portal search
function for each language
Total unique searches
Total number of unique searches using portal search function for
each language
Number of key words used in
portal search
Total number of key words used in portal search for each
language

18. To keep in mind
• English and French are widely spoken in
various African countries
• Spanish are spoken in Latin America and
Caribbean
• Researchers and teachers tend to use English
language for retrieving content

19. Results

20. Portal-level statistics (overall)
Unique
visitors/day
Bounces/day
Page
views/day
Visits/day
World 118.29 85.10 441.25 144.26

21. Portal-level statistics
(studied countries)
Region
Browser
language(s)
Unique
visitors/day
Bounces/day
Page
views/day
Visits/day
Latin America
and the
Caribbean
es 3.38 1.99 7.31 3.76
Northern Africa en, fr, ar 1.53 1.27 2.71 1.63
Southern Africa en 0.35 0.26 0.73 0.38
Eastern Africa en 0.85 0.60 1.95 0.96
Western Africa en 0.43 0.32 0.80 0.46
Southern Asia en 5.22 3.90 10.21 5.63
Southeastern
Asia
en, fil, id, vi 2.00 1.48 3.42 2.12
East Asia cn 1.29 0.97 2.59 1.44

22. Portal-level statistics
(studied countries)

23. Queries for reaching the portal
• Users using web search engines (e.g. Google)
• More than 40,000 terms used for reaching the
portal
• Top-500 terms were filtered
– terms in irrelevant languages (e.g. European) were
rejected
– Only English & Spanish terms were available
Term language
Total number of
visits
Total number of
terms
Search depth
English 10,185 93 3.30
Spanish 498 6 1.37

24. Queries within the portal
• Users using the Organic.Edunet search
mechanisms
• More than 5,000 terms used for retrieving
content within the portal
• Top-500 terms were filtered
– Only English, Spanish and French terms were
available
Term language Unique queries
Total number of
terms
Search depth
English 2,547 88 2.86
Spanish 426 19 6.21
French 9 1 3.67

25. Conclusions

26. Conclusions
• The behavior of the users in a portal is
affected by the multilinguality aspects of the
portal.
– Increased activity was noticed in countries with
language support and with language support in
the portal
• English language was mainly used for queries
– Both in web search engines and within the portal
– Even in countries with language support

27. Conclusions
• Users from regions in which widely-used
languages are spoken but not supported by
the portal at metadata/content level did not
provide significant traffic
– Arabic, Chinese, Hindi
• Multilinguality aspects of the portal can affect
the behavior of the users in the portal
– Both at user interface and at metadata/resource
level

28. For more info, visit Organic.Edunet at
• Web Portal: www.organic-edunet.eu
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/organic.edunet
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/OrganicLingua
• Flickr: www.flickr.com/search/?q=organicedunet