Lecturers as curators
Selecting, structuring and presenting cross-media materials in higher professional education
ProjectA curator in a museum is able to select and arrange artefacts like no one else. Can lecturers learn something from this when it comes to selecting and organising cross-media teaching materials?
Over the past decades, more and more digital materials have become available: from research articles and journal items to online courses and YouTube videos. As a result, there is an oversupply of course materials that lecturers in higher professional education can use. In order to advance student learning, it is important that these materials are selected, structured and presented in an appropriate way. Lecturers should not just select materials that are corresponding to their subject and students; they also need to consider the structuring and linking of those materials.
The task of selecting course material shows similarities with the task of a curator in a museum. After all, a museum curator specialises in selecting, arranging, organising and contextualising artefacts. Little is known about the way lecturers in higher professional education fulfil the role of curator and how they can be supported in this. This research is therefore investigating how lecturers in Dutch higher professional education select, structure and present course materials from the perspective of ‘curation’.
The central question in this study is:
How do lecturers in Dutch higher professional education curate cross-media materials for educational purposes and how can they be supported in doing this?
The purpose of this research is to develop an empirical model for ‘educational curation’ that can be used to support and train lecturers in higher professional education.
