Sharing of resources among teachers

Sharing of resources is in my opinion one of the main aspect in e-learning. Sarah in her blog “E-learning vs. Copyright and IPR” commented about the issue of teachers sharing their resources and whether teachers will be willing to share resources. In a particular website by Greg Webb (http://ps.pageseeder.com/ps/jg/papers/teachers/teachers.pshtml) elicited some points on why teachers are unwilling to share their resources in which I wish to elaborate in this post.

Among the points that he mentioned I agreed perfectly with the point where he said “fear of being judged by peers”. I think that this is crucial because teachers are not used to be assessed especially seniors one. Thus when they are asked to share their resources they tend to be afraid that they are not of a high quality and thus the other teachers will gossip about their resources. Also they might be afraid that there will be some information which is not updated and thus this will show that they are not doing their work good enough. I heard a situation where teachers were not willing to allow students’ teachers observing them in classes because they were afraid that they will tell something to the assistant head or the head.

On the other hand those teachers who work really hard to produce new resources may also not be willing to share them because of loss of intellectual property. Abuses happens all the time and some teachers may take the resources of other teachers, remove their names and add their names. Also the issue of power where sharing of resources as Webb describes 'empowers' non-experts.

I think that in order to move to e-learning and sharing of resources, one has to encourage team work between teachers and even start doing this from university where we will be brought up with the mentality of contributing and sharing our resources and not constantly competition with each other.

There also should be a system which will be monitored and where teachers can use other teachers’ resources depending on how much (and also the quality) they contributed on sharing their resources. In this way the problem of abusing from this sharing will be minimised.

Webb., G (2000). Why Teachers Don't Share Resources, And What We Can Do About It retrieved from http://ps.pageseeder.com/ps/jg/papers/teachers/teachers.pshtml on 8th January, 2011