Sharing the wealth:a proposal for discipline-based repositories of shared educational resources

This essay proposes a novel approach to developing shared educational resources for higher education. Building on characteristics of successful moves to open access in scholarly publishing, it scopes a network of discipline-based cross-institutional hubs for finding, sharing and reusing educational outputs. As well as creating repositories of content, these pilot hubs would help to create structures and processes that allow scholars to share and reuse educational outputs with confidence. The essay considers the broader scholarly and regulatory environment within which these hubs would sit, possible mechanisms for developing the hubs, and the ways in which a richer shared educational environment might benefit academics and students. It acknowledges the tension between the aspirations of ‘open education’ and the more limited version of shared resources proposed, but suggests that establishing conventions and structures is an important stepping stone towards a genuinely open educational environment.