The process of selecting, structuring, and sharing resources is an essential part of course design. However, little is known about the specific activities involved, or about the beliefs that shape these activities. Filling this gap will provide valuable input for designing a new model for educational curation, that can inform future research and educational development activities, in order to improve students’ learning processes and the quality of education.

How lecturers in higher education handle educational resources during course design has become increasingly relevant with the growing amount of digitally available educational resources (e.g. Baas et al., 2023). Lecturers do not only search for resources, they also handle these resources in view of supporting students’ learning. A concept that plays a key role in this is the concept of curation, which is used in a variety of fields to describes the complex set of activities involved in handling resources and materials (e.g. Anderson, 2015; Cherrstrom & Boden, 2020). Curation entails more than selection; it also involves activities that add a perspective to resources through structuring and arranging them for a specific audience (e.g. Bhaskar, 2016).

Despite the recognition of curation as a valuable concept for education and the availability of conceptual models for curation in higher education (Deschaine & Sharma, 2015; Wolff & Mulholland, 2013), there is a lack of empirical knowledge on how lecturers approach this process of curation. It is unclear what activities they undertake and if there is a set order in which they carry out these activities. Commonly used models for course design such as the Systems Approach Model (Dick & Carey, 1996) or the ASSURE model (Heinich et al., 1998) provide little detail about this.

Additionally, it is unclear what motivates lecturers’ curational behaviour. In general, it is known that lecturers’ design decisions are influenced by a variety of factors, such as their knowledge and beliefs (Boschman et al., 2015), their views on education (e.g. Trigwell et al., 2005), and their self-efficacy (e.g. Griffioen et al., 2013). A model that considers behaviour from a variety of influences is Ajzen’s Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) (1991). This theory explains how behaviour is shaped by behavioural intentions, which are influenced by three conceptually independent determinants, each stemming from underlying beliefs. The first determinant depicts how beliefs about performing a behaviour shape a person’s positive or negative attitude towards it. Secondly, normative beliefs, meaning how a person thinks other people, such as colleagues, regard the behaviour, have implications for a person’s subjective norms. Finally, control beliefs, or a person’s view of how easy or difficult it would be to perform the behaviour, shape that person’s sense of control, also known as perceived behavioural control, which includes self-efficacy. However, insights in how beliefs and norms influence lecturers’ curational behaviour are lacking.

Therefore, curational behaviour is at the core of this study: the aim is to shed light on how lecturers in higher education undertake this process of educational curation and unravel what shapes this behaviour, taking into account the determinants of behaviour as formulated in the TPB. With this, we will address the following research question: how do lecturers in higher education curate educational resources and what shapes this curational behaviour?

23 semi-structured interviews were conducted with lecturers at a Dutch University of Applied Sciences. Respondents were selected based on having a role as a course coordinator or similar, to ensure they played a large part in the course design and were responsible for the curation of resources in a course. Considering the explorative nature of the research question, respondents with a wide variety of disciplinary backgrounds were included, along Biglan’s (1973) classification of academic disciplines. An interview guide was constructed, using the Interview Protocol Refinement Framework (Castillo-Montoya, 2016) to strengthen the reliability of the interview protocol, and the interviews were carries out via MS Teams. Respondents were invited to share a course they had designed, and were asked to reflect on their thoughts and reasoning during the design process, reminiscent of a stimulated recall interview (Vesterinen et al., 2010). The interviews were recorded, transcribed, summarized, coded, and analysed following a thematic analysis approach (Braun & Clarke, 2006). This was done in two parts. In the first part, a codebook for coding activities was developed through an inductive approach (Ando et al., 2014), focusing on activities lecturers mentioned having undertaken. With this codebook, all interviews were coded. Subsequently, in the first part of the analysis the different activities that emerged were described using thematic analysis. Also, lists of coded activities per interview were created, reflecting the order in which activities appeared in the interviews. The interviews were then grouped based on similar characteristics (starting points and subsequent steps), leading to the identification of five different groups or approaches. For each approach, a flow chart was drawn. To ensure analytical quality, each flow chart was then checked back against each interview that was categorized into this approach. The second part of the study focused on identifying motivations. For this, the TPB was used as a framework that informed the first version of a separate codebook, with codes grouped according to behavioural, normative, and control beliefs. During the coding, these codes, when applicable, were linked with specific curational activities and specific approaches of educational curation. Following the coding, thematic analysis lead to a detailed description of motivations that influence lecturers’ curational behaviour.

The findings show that lecturers undertake several distinguishable but interconnected activities when curating educational resources. The analysis yielded six different groups of activities that make up curational behaviour: searching for resources, assessing and selecting resources, creating and editing resources, structuring resources, sharing resources and soliciting feedback. Furthermore, it has become clear from the data that lecturers’ curational behaviour explicitly takes place in the context of wider course design activities, that reach beyond curational behaviour. What stands out, is that when they are sharing resources, lecturers do not regularly consider constructing a narrative that relates resources, or provide students with didactical support. This raises questions, as these are activities that, when looking at the theory on curation in general, could be considered key components of curation. Moreover, this study indicates that lecturers do not approach educational curation in one generic way. Five different approaches emerge from the interviews: the Selector, the Creator, the Mixer, the Booklover, and the Collector approach. These approaches differ in activities they do or do not include and on the emphasis certain activities get, with slight variations in the order of these activities. Motivations that shape lecturers’ curational behaviour can be understood through behavioural, normative, and control belief, as suggested by the TPB. A behavioural belief that is mentioned often, is the belief that the selection, structure, or way of sharing of resources contributes to students’ learning outcomes. Normative beliefs found describe that expectations that management or students hold (or are believed to hold) play an important role in handling resources. And finally, the time available to curate resources and a lecturer’s personal skills or experiences are regularly named control beliefs that shape curational behaviour. The proposed paper will provide more detail on how lecturers curate educational resources and what shapes their curational behaviour.

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