A research design to capture lecturers' curational behaviour

Lecturers in higher education who design courses, should consider, among other things, the use of educational resources (Van den Akker, 2004). They have an abundance of resources at their disposal and it is important they select, structure and present those resources in ways that benefit their students (Littlejohn, 2011). It is often recognized that this task of selecting, structuring and presenting resources is remarkably similar to the task of curators in museums. Today, the notion of curation is also used more widely to describe a complex set of activities that center around dealing with large quantities of information (Snyder, 2015). In education, lecturers are increasingly regarded as curators (e.g. Anderson, 2015; Siemens, 2007). However, little is known about lecturers’ curational behaviour (Wolff & Mulholland, 2013). A literature review shows that previous research has mainly looked at criteria lecturers apply when selecting resources, and at obstacles they experience (Leighton & Griffioen, 2019). Curation though consists of more than mere selection (Bhaskar, 2016), and behaviour is influenced by other elements than (perceived) obstacles (Ajzen, 1991). The proposed paper will present a research design for a PhD study in which 25 lecturers in a Dutch university of applied sciences will be interviewed about their curational behaviour. The participants experience in designing a course will be the starting point for the interviews and interview questions will be based on the Theory of Planned Behaviour questionnaire (Ajzen, 2019). With this proposed paper, the authors aim to invite questions, feedback and discussion on the research design.