From Culture Matters, a blog by current and former Anthropology students and staff from Macquarie, comes a thought-provoking post on the barriers to sharing teaching tools.  Here is an edited excerpt from what Lisa Wynn writes:

I just came from a [lecture] on using multimedia presentations to inspire students and facilitate learning. But I came away thinking about how people hoard their teaching tools (and how universities hoard their lecturers’ teaching tools) …

The lecture was by [Professor Des Butler] from the Law Faculty at the QUT …  [He showed] some of the really nifty interactive, multimedia tools he’d developed for his students that include podcasts, Blackboard-based web modules with short films embedded, web-based quizzes that produce automatic (but not individually tailored) feedback, and “machinima,” or movies he had scripted and then “acted out” in Second Life …

I wish I could just show his “Gondwana Airlines” tool or “The Merlin Affair” but I can’t because they’re not available unless you’re one of his students.

I can think of good reasons for making freely available at least some of the cool teaching tools their lecturers develop. These can serve as a kind of advertisement for the university, something that contributes to the university brand [such as the free online lectures that MIT makes available] …

I am working on my own online teaching tool, a web-based ethics teaching module, funded by a Learning and Teaching Fellowship from Macquarie. I plan on licensing it with a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license. In other words, others may download, redistribute, remix, tweak, and build upon the work non-commercially, as long as they credit the original authors and license their new creations under the identical terms, i.e. all derivative work must also be non-commercial in nature. I’m really excited about that, and I should say that everyone I’ve talked to at Macquarie is excited about it, too.

Read the full text and comments here.

What are your thoughts?  Are we - and our universities - having trouble sharing?  Why, and what can we do about it?

Filed under: Accessibility, Learning and Teaching Resources, Open Education by Agnes Bosanquet