Creating a Culture of Sharing: The Benefits of Open Educational Resources

Sharing is a habit before it is a policy

Open educational resources are materials for teaching and learning that carry a license allowing others to reuse, adapt and redistribute them. A license only makes sharing possible. Whether staff actually do it depends on shared habits: what colleagues expect of one another, what is rewarded, and what feels safe.

This article looks at how those norms tend to form among teaching staff and what pushes people towards or away from sharing. Cross-institution partnerships are a different topic, and the practical side of choosing licenses and formats is covered elsewhere.

How sharing norms form

Norms rarely arrive by announcement. They tend to grow in small steps.

A few people start by sharing within a team, perhaps a common folder of lesson plans. Others notice that it saves them time, and they begin to contribute. After a while, putting materials into the shared folder becomes the default rather than a favor. Only then does it feel natural to ask whether some of that material could be shared beyond the building.

Several things seem to help this progression, though no single factor guarantees it:

• Visible examples. Seeing a respected colleague share work makes it easier for others to follow.
• Low effort. If sharing needs extra forms, file conversions or approvals, many people will not bother.
• Reciprocity. People share more readily when they also receive useful material from others.
• Leadership that models it. When heads of department share their own work, sharing stops looking like an unusual risk.

What motivates people to share

Reasons vary from person to person, and most people have more than one.

Many teachers describe a professional or moral feeling that knowledge produced in publicly funded settings should be available to others. Some want to avoid repeating work that many colleagues are already doing separately. Some enjoy the feedback that comes from others using and improving their material. Others value recognition, whether a credit line, a mention in a review or a mention in a promotion portfolio. Open textbooks, for instance, are sometimes adopted by staff because they remove textbook costs for their students, which gives the effort a clear purpose beyond the staff member’s own convenience.

Recognition deserves particular attention. If an institution says it values openness but treats shared resources as irrelevant to appraisal, staff will reasonably conclude that the time is better spent elsewhere.

What blocks sharing

The barriers are often practical, and they are usually not about unwillingness.

Time. Preparing a resource for others means cleaning it up, checking that images and text may legally be reused, and writing a short description. Teachers with heavy timetables may not have that time, and the issue of educator workload comes up repeatedly in any discussion of open practice.

Confidence. Some staff worry that their materials are not good enough to be seen. Others fear criticism, or that a mistake will be visible to everyone. This worry is understandable and often unfounded, but it is real.

Uncertainty about rights. Materials often contain third-party images, extracts or diagrams. Staff may be unsure what they are allowed to publish, and a question of copyright and licensing can stop a project before it starts. It may also be unclear whether the employer or the teacher holds rights in work made as part of the job. That is a matter for the institution’s own policy and, where needed, for proper legal advice, not for guesswork.

Ownership and credit. Some people feel that their materials are a form of professional capital, which gives them standing. Giving that away without credit can feel like a loss. Good attribution practice, and a clear license, help.

Competition. In settings where staff or institutions compete for students or funding, sharing can feel like helping rivals. This is a genuine tension rather than a misunderstanding.

Quality worries. Some staff hesitate to use other people’s material because they cannot judge its quality quickly. A sharing culture needs ways of signaling what has been reviewed.

What helps in practice

A few approaches are commonly suggested, though results differ between settings:

1. Begin inside the group. A shared internal collection builds the habit with little risk.
2. Make the easy path the sharing path. Use simple templates that include a license statement and a short description.
3. Offer support. A librarian or a colleague who can answer rights questions removes a major barrier. The work of academic librarians in this area is a good example.
4. Recognize contributions. Count shared resources in the same way as other professional work, where the institution can.
5. Accept imperfect work. A rough resource that others can improve is often more useful than a polished one that never appears.

Sharing does not have to be all or nothing

It helps to separate degrees of sharing. A teacher might share with one department, then with a school, then with a wider network under an open license. Some materials will never be suitable to share, for example those containing student work or personal details, and that is a reasonable boundary.

A cautious view of the benefits

The benefits attributed to sharing are plausible: less duplicated effort, more varied ideas, lower costs for learners, and a stronger sense of professional community. But it is wise to be careful about claiming more. Whether a given sharing scheme saves time or improves teaching depends on its design and on the people involved, and published findings on these questions are mixed. The most honest summary is that a culture of sharing gives staff more options, and that it grows slowly where trust, time and recognition are present.