Learning to Share: Adaptation studies and Open Educational resources

This chapter does not discuss a particular approach to teaching adaptation studies. It is about finding more ways to share information about what we do in the classroom, getting feedback on our own teaching innovations and practices, and adding to our own resources though properly cited access to other people's ideas and practices. It is a utopian ambition in many ways, an idea beset with so many problems that reflects the realities of most academics' daily lives. In an area such as adaptation studies, opportunities for sharing within institutions may be minimal, with modules/units sometimes scattered across a number of disciplines, produced by individuals who may be isolated in their own departments or schools. Sharing resources is not about cutting corners or abdicating responsibility, autonomy, or curbing creativity; it may allow for faster innovation and change or diversity in the curriculum. In this way students profit from a cross-fertilization of ideas, and lecturers can browse materials produced by others as a way of refreshing as well as reflecting upon their own teaching. Different approaches to teaching may enable another person to pilot a new approach in their own department and perhaps gain professional recognition in the area of learning and teaching, a feature of academic life too often unrewarded.

During the course of this chapter, we explore the challenges and opportunities presented by sharing learning resources in adaptation studies by analyzing our own experiences of leading a funded project which enables a community of academics who might experience difficulties finding each other by traditional means. The project - entitled 'Bridging the Gap: Teaching adaptations across the disciplines and sharing content for curriculum renewal' - and led by Whelehan and Sadler- was funded by the Australian government's Office for Learning and Teaching (OLT) for one calendar year in 2012. The OLT, like the UK's Higher Education Academy (HEA) fosters good practice and innovation in learning and teaching by funding projects and rewarding individual excellence. The core aims of the project were to develop a 'community of practice' of adaptation scholars in Australia, based around the sharing of resources in this interdisciplinary field, facilitated by an open access repository designed to house and provide access to donated artefacts. A further output from the project was the development of a Toolkit (Good Practice Guide) which provides guidance on using and uploading resources to the repository, particularly in relation to guidance on copyright matters in an Australian context, which has application beyond this project and is available to share and reuse (with acknowledgement) in common with all other objects in the repository.