What culture means in a college
Culture is the unwritten set of expectations about how people behave: what is rewarded, what is risky, who shares and who guards. Two colleges with identical written policies can feel quite different because of their campus culture. Open education is partly a technical change but also a cultural one, since it asks people to treat teaching materials as something to share rather than keep.
The picture below is a general one, drawn from the kinds of patterns institutions commonly describe. Individual campuses vary, and there is limited rigorous research on cultural change, so the claims here are modest.
The starting point: teaching as private work
In many institutions, teaching has traditionally been a private activity. Lecture notes, slides and exam questions belong to the individual who made them. Colleagues seldom see each other’s classes. There can be good reasons: academic freedom, pride of authorship, worry about being judged, or fear that sharing exposes weaknesses.
Research is different. Publication, citation and peer review are built into academic life, and credit for it is well understood. Teaching materials have rarely had comparable systems of attribution, so sharing them feels like giving something away without return.
How attitudes tend to evolve
Cultural change around sharing often passes through recognisable phases, though not in a fixed order and not at every institution.
Curiosity and doubt. A few staff try open resources. Others question quality, worry about extra work or wonder whether it threatens their role.
Early sharing among enthusiasts. A small group shares and adapts materials. They tend to be people with existing interest or strong support from colleagues.
Visible examples. When peers see colleagues saving students money or getting positive feedback, the idea becomes more credible than any announcement.
Normalizing. Asking “is there an open option?” becomes routine in course planning. Sharing within departments becomes less remarkable.
Setbacks. A funding cut, a leadership change or an embarrassing error may cause people to retreat. Culture is not a ratchet.
A culture of openness is therefore something to be tended, not declared. Some staff will remain unconvinced, and that is not necessarily a failure; the aim is usually to make sharing an easy and respected choice, not an obligation.
Credit and recognition
The central cultural question is credit. People share more readily when they are credited and when the effort counts toward something.
Useful forms of recognition include:
- Clear attribution built into licenses and into the way materials are displayed.
- Mention of open teaching work in appraisal and promotion criteria.
- Internal awards or small grants, which signal that the institution values the work, if used sparingly.
- Workload allowances for developing and maintaining materials.
Without these, sharing depends on goodwill, and goodwill runs out. Where staff feel the institution profits from their unpaid labor, openness can breed resentment and weaken the culture of sharing it was meant to build.
Trust and vulnerability
Sharing materials publicly exposes teaching to scrutiny. A culture that handles mistakes constructively makes this safer. If errors found in a shared resource are met with blame, staff will stop sharing. If they are met with thanks for the correction, a habit of improvement can grow.
The same applies to students. Inviting them to contribute or to correct materials works best where they are treated as partners and where there is a clear, non-punitive way to raise issues.
Collaboration across boundaries
Open practices can encourage staff to work together on shared resources and to form communities of practice. These groups may outlast individual projects and become a lasting feature of campus life. They depend, though, on time and on leaders who protect it. Where structures keep departments apart, openness alone will not cross them.
Warning signs
Some signals suggest the cultural change is shallow:
- Open work is done only by a few individuals, often junior or on short contracts.
- Policy exists but is rarely mentioned in everyday decisions.
- People describe sharing as a favor to the library or a senior leader.
- Criticism of open materials is discouraged rather than discussed.
Reasonable expectations
Culture changes slowly, over years, and it is difficult to measure. Staff surveys, interviews and observation of what is rewarded offer more reliable clues than public statements. A realistic outcome is not a transformed campus but a gradual widening of what colleagues consider normal, supported by recognition and by examples that people can see for themselves.