A fair exchange? Sharing the Social Science curriculum in the context of the Open Education movement in Higher Education

This seminar reports a doctoral study completed in 2014 that examined current practices in course planning and design in higher education in the United Kingdom and the factors that affect how courses can be shared and re-made. It will outline one of the case studies of cross-institution curriculum sharing involving 12 academics across 10 UK HE institutions taking part in a national initiative to develop open educational resources for learning and teaching the Social Sciences in universities. A social realist approach, combining the theories of Pierre Bourdieu, Basil Bernstein and Karl Maton, is applied to reveal the underlying principles operating in the curriculum.