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.