Bootstrapping a Culture of Sharing to Facilitate Open Educational Resources

It seems self-evident that life for teachers would be simplified if there existed a large corpus of relevant resources that was available for them to reuse and for inquisitive students to download. The learning object community has worked for the past decade and more to provide the necessary infrastructure, standards, and specifications to facilitate such beneficial activity, but the take-up has been disappointingly small, particularly in University and Higher Education, which is the subject of this research. The problem has been that practitioners have not deposited their teaching resources, or have not made them openly available, in the quantity that would achieve critical mass for uptake. EdShare and the Language Box are two initiatives that have concentrated on the issue of facilitating and improving the practice of sharing, the former in an institutional setting and the latter in a subject community of practice. This paper describes and analyzes the motivations for these projects, the design decisions they took in implementing their repositories, the approaches they took to change agency and practice within their communities, and the changes, in practice, that have so far been observed. The contribution of this paper is an improved understanding of how to encourage educational communities to share.