Abstract
Academics in higher education are used to having their research publications reviewed and openly scrutinized. Teaching in higher education has traditionally been an individual academic’s activity that has taken place in a closed classroom. However, the introduction of open education, particularly massive open online courses (MOOCs) has challenged this. In MOOCs, lectures are recorded and made public for thousands of course participants to view. This study investigates, via semi-structured interviews, how 20 lecturers of 10 MOOCs at six Swedish Universities have experienced this. All have joined the projects voluntarily, but a few have done so with some ambivalence. For them, standing in front of the camera, publishing material and, to some extent, losing control of the course content was scary at the beginning of the projects. Overall, the lecturers overcame this and thought that it was a good opportunity to reach many students, as well as a way to keep up with the changing requirements for teaching in higher education.
Highlights
Research in higher education (HE) is scrutinized, reviewed, published, disseminated, cited and continuously challenged by upcoming research
The lecturers’ views on going public ranged from lecturers who think that it is not a big issue, represented by the quote “like your party pictures in facebook, that is not a concern” [211], to the lecturer who expressed that it’s hard to figure somewhere public on a video or somewhere on the Internet
Questions the lecturers put to themselves were: “Is the content up to date?”; “Will it be used in any improper ways?” and “Are the most important parts of my teaching still understandable in the compressed material?” It is about whether or not to give away material
Summary
Research in higher education (HE) is scrutinized, reviewed, published, disseminated, cited and continuously challenged by upcoming research. Sharing and awareness material is not as common as could be expected despite the growing use of open educational resources (OER) (Belikov & Bodily, 2016; Cronin, 2017; Nascimbeni & Burgos, 2016). Campus and online education have merged to a large degree, and it is common that blended courses on campus have some ingredients from online teaching and vice versa (Gregory & Lodge, 2015). Another trend is the introduction of OER that has its roots in the open source movement and open access publishing (Weller, 2014). The paragraph will focus on lecturers’ experiences of sharing and wanting to be a part of the open education trend
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