Souhad SHLAKA, Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Science in Rabat, part of Mohammed V University. She holds a PhD in ‘Educational Engineering’. She is a designer, producer and trainer of online courses and has been involved in several projects. She is also a member of the ICESCO Chair for Open Education and an expert for ICESCO.

Sharing allows knowledge to grow and improve in quality. Sharing also offers a large number of learners the chance to benefit from knowledge that is not always accessible. In an educational context, Open Educational Resources (OER) act as a key driver of openness, providing a framework for sharing structured by rules such as open licences. These licences define the conditions for reusing, modifying and distributing content, with the aim of fostering collaboration, accessibility and pedagogical innovation.

However, embracing the ethos of sharing and openness is, above all, a personal decision driven by intrinsic motivations. These motivations, or the reasons behind such sharing, remain largely absent in the academic sphere as they are influenced by factors such as the fear of being plagiarised, the fear of facing negative judgement from peers, or the exploitation of content by other teachers. Another key factor that can hinder this desire for openness is the competitive spirit that prevails in universities. In the Moroccan context – and I mention this because I am part of it – promotion to a higher rank or status involves an evaluation process based on the academic, pedagogical and scientific performance of the lecturer-researcher. In this context, it becomes difficult to share one’s course or resources at the risk of losing precious points! But limiting one’s course to a handout or a PowerPoint presentation intended exclusively for students enrolled in the module confines access to knowledge to a lecture theatre and condemns it to remain frozen in time and space.

So, how can this be remedied? Answering this question must be part of a holistic approach that requires the involvement of all stakeholders in the system.

1. Changing teachers’ mindsets through a proper understanding of the benefits of sharing

Many express reluctance and resistance to sharing their resources (course content, exercises, PowerPoint slides, etc.). They feel they put in a huge amount of effort and spend a great deal of time on them. Consequently, sharing with a colleague can sometimes seem impossible. The first step towards overcoming this resistance is the need for reassurance! This involves raising awareness of the use of an open licence (such as Creative Commons), which allows the creator to define the permissions for distribution and use whilst ensuring attribution of authorship. Furthermore, teachers must be made to understand that openness leads to improvements in quality and time management. Teachers are strongly encouraged to rethink their educational and teaching practices so that they are geared towards collective intelligence and collaborative work between peers within a dynamic of sharing and openness.

2. Institutional changes through the promotion of collaborative work within the department and/or between departments

In our institutional context, delivering a course individually is worth a full mark, whereas a course co-delivered with colleagues results in a lower mark. This simple situation is enough to stifle any initiatives for collaborative work. In this regard, it is up to the institution to encourage and promote the harmonisation of courses (in the case of cross-disciplinary modules and courses taught by several lecturers), particularly as the syllabus is the same. And, of course, the assessment framework must be revised so that it focuses on criteria relating to the quality of work, innovation and openness.

3. National collaboration through the creation of open disciplinary networks supported by a national strategy

If the accreditation of a degree programme necessarily requires validation by the ministerial committee, this implies the approval of the modules (disciplinary and cross-disciplinary) that constitute it. Thus, it would be wise to create open disciplinary networks that would pave the way for the collective enrichment of content. To achieve this, a genuine data protection policy must be developed, underpinned by a legal framework derived from a well-established national strategy.

In conclusion, embracing sharing means moving beyond an individualistic and competitive mindset to engage in a dynamic of collaboration and continuous improvement in the quality of resources. In the Moroccan university context, taking the step towards sharing relies on the pooling of efforts by all stakeholders in the sector (teachers, decision-makers and managers). It is therefore not only a matter of making resources available, but above all of freeing up practices and mindsets, so that knowledge can circulate, evolve and benefit as many people as possible.

About the featured image of the article

The original artistic intention remains that of the artist and can be different from the editorial intention of our remix. We thank Lorenzo Miola for sharing his work under an open licence CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.