In today’s era of content abundance, a huge amount of resources is available digitally, from research articles to news items and from online courses to YouTube videos. As a result, lecturers in higher education have an endless supply of crossmedia materials that they can present to students as learning materials. This presents lecturers with the challenge of selecting those materials in such a way that they match the course topic and prior knowledge and proficiency level of the students. Additionally, they need to consider how to structure resources and how to make connections between them in order to support students’ learning (Kallenberg, et al., 2009). It is often recognized (e.g. Anderson, 2015; Siemens, 2008) that this task is remarkably similar to the task of curators in museums, who expertly make selections and organize and contextualize artefacts (Bhaskar, 2016). Considering those similarities, surprisingly little is known about how lecturers conduct this task. This study investigates how lecturers in Dutch higher professional education select, structure and present crossmedia resources for educational purposes, from the perspective of curation. This paper aims to provide an overview of relevant research regarding “lecturers as curators” in the context of higher education. It will share the outcomes of a literature review, for which articles were identified in three databases (ERIC, Web of Science (WoS) and Catalogue Plus), using the search word “curation” combined with filters for the field of (higher) education. Only articles published in English in peer reviewed journals, institutional research reports and conference proceedings prior to November 2018 were selected. This led to a selection of 64 articles that focused on curation within higher education. Of these, 17 focused on curation of learning materials done by lecturers. Findings show that there is relatively little research into lecturers’ curational processes. Although most articles identify the notion of curation as a useful approach in teaching, they fail to describe overarching processes or criteria for succesful curation. Five of the reviewed studies describe curational practices by specific groups of lecturers, teaching a specific subject such as maths or music. Seven other studies focus on the outcome of lecturers’ curation processes, describing the curated collections that are the result of it. Additionally, two articles present a conceptual model of educational curation; namely Wolff & Mulholland’s (2013) Curational Inquiry Learning Cycle and Deschaine & Sharma’s (2015) 5C Model. Both models approach the process of curation as a sequential multistep model, in which steps cannot be seen independently: meaning is added with every step of the process. Although they use different terminology, steps such as collecting, selecting, organising, and presenting resources are identified. However, both models have not been tested empirically. The authors acknowledge the importance of this, by stressing that more research into the topic is necessary. The proposed paper will present a complete overview of the findings, summarize the two models, and indicate how these models can be a starting point for further empirical research.
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In today’s era of content abundance, lecturers in higher education have an endless supply of crossmedia materials they can present to students as learning materials. This confronts lecturers with the challenge to select those materials in such a way that they match both course topics and proficiency levels of students. Additionally, they need to consider how to structure resources and make connections between them in order to support students’ learning. It is often recognized that this task is remarkably similar to the task of curators in museums.This paper aims to provide an overview of research regarding ‘lecturers as curators’ in the context of higher education. Thirty articles that focus on curation of learning materials by lecturers were identified and analysed. Although most articles recognize the notion of curation as a useful approach, they fail to describe overarching processes or criteria for successful curation of learning materials.
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The demands on lecturers in higher education to select, structure, and contextualise relevant and up-to-date resources for their students have increased; behaviour that is often referred to as curation. Currently, systematic insight into lecturers’ curational behaviour is limited. This scoping literature review provides an overview of the existing body of knowledge regarding lecturers’ curational behaviour. Twenty-four articles were selected and analysed, using the framework of Ajzen's Theory of Planned Behaviour). Findings show that although studies can be linked to elements of the TPB, current research does not approach curational behaviour as an interconnected process of behaviour and its intentions. Additionally, current research mainly focusses on selection of resources; other elements of curation such as structuring resources and providing context are overlooked. More knowledge of lecturers’ curational behaviour could lead to better understanding of how lecturers’ curation could be supported, which could improve the quality of higher education.
