Sharing is a Challenge, 16 Obstacles Overcome to Enhance Sharing

All of our episodes are special but this one even more so as it was recorded the day that the article Virginia Rodés co-authored with Regina Motz, Between openness and responsibility: how to make good use of Open Educational Resources was published as part of the Sharing is a Challenge series addressing the challenge of “Misuse.”

This multiauthor, multilingual collaboration released a new article 4 days each week during March 2026, in alignment with Open Education Week.

Joining us in this conversation was ringleader for the project Colin de la Higuera, UNESCO RELIA Chair plus his colleague from Nantes University, Lucie Grasset, who was one of the team that coordinated the complex effort, plus OEGlobal Co-Executive Director Marcela Morales — who wrote the first article in the series on the challenge of Legitimacy.

Colin and Lucie spoke about the why and how of the project, which produced in sum 17 articles in 6 languages written by 30 co-authors from 15 countries published across three web sites. And OEGlobal set up a hub on the Open Education Week site that used the feeds from all sites to dynamically list the articles as they were released plus discussion threads always open for your comments in OEG Connect.

Virginia shared he she and Regina flipped the issue of “Misuse” to openness and responsibility. This comes from Virginia’s research and practice working with faculty noting the obstacles of appropriation. It has also been influenced by her thinking deeply in her current research on impact of Artificial Intelligence on open education, and how ethics should be approached not only individually but systemically. Her article for the series is cast humanly as a conversation between two educators with both a common ground of motivation for open education and differing perspectives on the rile of responsibility. Yet they come to a place of respect and understanding at the end.

Update: The team behind the project has translated this episode’s post into French.

In This Episode

FYI: For the sake of experimentation and the spirit of transparency, this set of show notes alone was generated by the AI “Underlord” in the Descript editor we use to produce OEGlobal Voices.

OE Global Voices #97: Sharing Is a Challenge—Misuse, Responsibility, and the Work Behind a Global OER Series
Host Alan Levine convenes Colin de la Higuera, Lucie Grasset, Virginia Rodes, and OE Global executive co-director Marcela Morales to discuss the “Sharing is a Challenge” article series published for Open Education Week and coordinated by Colin with support from Lucie and a University of Nantes team. Colin explains the series grew from reframing OER workshops around “sharing” and identifying obstacles that make sharing harder today, including AI. Lucie describes the production workflow: collecting articles from 27 authors, editing, translating (including via DeepL with review), publishing across three WordPress blogs, distributing a daily newsletter, and cross-posting to OEG Connect. Virginia discusses her article on “Misuse,” reframed as openness and responsibility amid generative AI, governance, quality, representation, platform enclosure, and provenance concerns. Marcela connects responsibility to legitimacy and the community’s need for practical guidance.

• 00:00 Intro Music and Highlight Quotes
• 00:43 Podcast Welcome And Context
• 01:58 Meet The Guests
• 05:39 Why Sharing Is A Challenge
• 07:27 Recruiting Authors And Topics
• 09:11 Behind The Daily Publishing
• 12:21 Threads And Early Feedback
• 15:33 Virginia On Misuse And Responsibility
• 19:13 Conversation Format And Examples
• 26:51 Legitimacy Meets Responsibility
• 29:27 Maturity Of Sharing Practices
• 32:28 Whats Coming Next
• 36:57 Hobbies And Human Side
• 41:38 Retirement And AI Teaching Challenges
• 43:03 Closing Credits And Outro

(end of AI generated show notes)

Additional Links and Quotes for Episode 97

 So we continued working in that line saying, okay, perhaps sharing is an interesting word. We can use it in a way independently of having to explain the Five Rs and UNESCO and whatever. And it’s true. it’s a word which resonates so much with teachers– difficult to find a teacher who’s in the game for something else than sharing. They’re all in the game for sharing.

So that’s where it comes from. And then little by little we understood that, it sounded nice, but it was much more difficult we thought, and that there was something like obstacles to sharing. And we then just listed the obstacles and off we went.

Colin de la Higuera

• 23 Good Reasons for Open Education (2025)
• Sharing… Our challenges for 2026
  • Sharing… 16 challenges for 2026 (hub for Open Education Week)
  • Sharing is a Challenge Recap
  • “Sharing is a Challenge” : the Series Comes to an End, the Sharing Continues
• DeepL (used for translation)

 And that is the way, responsibility appears as part of approaching misuse. It’s not only a problem of ethics when you use contents that have been developed by other people. Now there is another actor in the landscape that is AI, Generative AI mostly, that take part [in] adaptations.

This is one of the aspects that I see the individual perspective of ethics has to be transferred to responsibility, not only as an individual responsibility, but mostly as a problem of governance, a problem of accountability, a problem of stress.

Virginia Rodés

• Between openness and responsibility: how to make good use of Open Educational Resources by Virginia Rodés & Regina Motz
  • Entre apertura y responsabilidad: cómo usar bien los Recursos Educativos Abiertos
  • Entre ouverture et responsabilité : comment bien utiliser les ressources éducatives libres
• Dubai Declaration on Open Educational Resources (OER) (UNESCO)
• Mate (drink) (Wikipedia)

• Nantes Université Frabrique REL
• Fabrique REL Quebec
• From Obligation to Recognition in Open Education by Luc Massou
• How Authors Can Make Their OERs “Discoverable” by Benedetta Calonaci & Alessandra Gammino
  • Come gli Autori possono far “scoprire” le proprie OER (original in Italian)
• Usefulness: Do we still need OER in the age of AI? by Fawzi Baroud & Mitja Jermol
• Open Educational Resources: Is Sharing Really Time-Consuming? by Sophie Depoterre, José-Miguel Escobar-Zuniga, Paul Lyonnaz & Nadia Villeneuve
• Beyond Prestige: Whose Knowledge Counts in Open Education? – Legitimacy as a Barrier to Sharing by Marcela Morales

The open licensed music for this episode is a track called Share Your Project by TimTaj shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Like most of our podcast music, it was found at the Free Music Archive (see our full FMA playlist).

A photo of the location of the team behind the Sharing is a Challenge series of Nantes, France included as background in the featured image for this episode is Nantes, Sud Ouest flickr photo by Arnaud Abélard shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA 2.0) license.