I have really appreciated the introduction to the topic 2 by Kiruthika Ragupathi when she mentioned about re-using online material to increase efficiency [1]. As I have mentioned during the padlet reflection, we as teachers we spent so much time in developing lectures and we could be much more efficient by using someone else lecture and investing more time on something else, for instance exercises or other more interesting activities for the students, such as study visits or laboratories. Personally, I have been sharing several mathematical codes and research data but I have never been sharing teaching materials. I can see that there are quite a lot of advantages and disadvantages in sharing teaching materials.
An advantage in sharing teaching material is that this can be a good commercial for me as a teacher and as a researcher because it will increase the number of followers I have in the research communities such as ResearchGate and thus also citations. Sharing material with the logo of my university can also be a good commercial for my university.
Some of the disadvantages in sharing teaching materials are the following. First of all, before sharing my teaching material, I would like that it goes through a some kind of review process, it can also be an internal review process carried out by my colleagues at the university for instance or by other colleges in other universities. Indeed, I would like to avoid spreading mistakes in my online material that could damage the university and myself. Another burden is the copyright of images; I personally think that this is a complicated issue and it probably would be good to ask the opinions of the lawyer of the university. One way to avoid issues with the copyright of figures can be buying pictures in pictures database and or ask professionals to develop figures. However, this can be very costly ad sometimes we do not have budget for these extra matters. In this context, I extremely agree with the view of David Wiley in his TED-talk Open education and the future [2], technology has been developed so much and knowledge could be spread so easily but still there are some mechanisms and attitudes that prevent from sharing. I have appreciated the analogy between today’s technology and sharing attitudes and the development of books and restrictions to translate the Bible in the 15th century.
At the beginning of this topic, I thought that technology was one of the barrier for sharing. Especially, I was thinking that I would have needed a platform and support from the university for sharing my material. I had this thought because last year we wanted to share a code on the university website as an outcome of a project conducted at the university and we have experienced some kind of resistance from the university due to the extra work for the IT department. During the lectures but mostly during the group discussions I have been learning a lot on how share learning materials and I´m planning to do it in the near future. In particular, one of my colleague in the PBL group was very experienced in Creative Commons license [3]. I have started to look around and I have also found that Canvas, the platform used in my university, can be used as a platform for sharing material under Canvas Commons [4]. Personally, I feel I am very interested in sharing teaching materials but I still feel I am very ignorant on how to do this in the right way. I would appreciate and look for more support, both technical but also legal, from my university to avoid making any kind of illegal action (several issues came up during the discussion after the webinar for Topic 2).
References
[1] https://padlet.com/alacre/ONL201T2
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rb0syrgsH6M
[3] https://creativecommons.org/
[4] http://www.openwa.org/canvas-commons/
