Lecturers as Curators of Educational Resources: A Literature Review

In today’s era of content abundance, lecturers in higher education have an endless supply of crossmedia materials they can present to students as learning materials. This confronts lecturers with the challenge to select those materials in such a way that they match both course topics and proficiency levels of students. Additionally, they need to consider how to structure resources and make connections between them in order to support students’ learning. It is often recognized that this task is remarkably similar to the task of curators in museums.
This paper aims to provide an overview of research regarding ‘lecturers as curators’ in the context of higher education. Thirty articles that focus on curation of learning materials by lecturers were identified and analysed. Although most articles recognize the notion of curation as a useful approach, they fail to describe overarching processes or criteria for successful curation of learning materials.