Lecturers in higher education who design courses, should consider, among other
things, the use of educational resources (Van den Akker, 2004). They have an
abundance of resources at their disposal and it is important they select, structure
and present those resources in ways that benefit their students (Littlejohn, 2011). It
is often recognized that this task of selecting, structuring and presenting resources is
remarkably similar to the task of curators in museums. Today, the notion of curation
is also used more widely to describe a complex set of activities that center around
dealing with large quantities of information (Snyder, 2015). In education, lecturers
are increasingly regarded as curators (e.g. Anderson, 2015; Siemens, 2007).
However, little is known about lecturers’ curational behaviour (Wolff & Mulholland,
2013). A literature review shows that previous research has mainly looked at criteria
lecturers apply when selecting resources, and at obstacles they experience (Leighton
& Griffioen, 2019). Curation though consists of more than mere selection (Bhaskar,
2016), and behaviour is influenced by other elements than (perceived) obstacles
(Ajzen, 1991). The proposed paper will present a research design for a PhD study in
which 25 lecturers in a Dutch university of applied sciences will be interviewed
about their curational behaviour. The participants experience in designing a course
will be the starting point for the interviews and interview questions will be based on
the Theory of Planned Behaviour questionnaire (Ajzen, 2019). With this proposed
paper, the authors aim to invite questions, feedback and discussion on the research
design.