The reasons behind the resources: Understanding the beliefs that shape lecturers' educational curation

This study explores lecturers' educational curation, that is: how they select, structure and share educational resources, and how this curational behaviour is shaped by their beliefs. Semi‐structured interviews with 23 lecturers at a Dutch University of Applied Sciences show that curational behaviour comprises five curational activities: searching for resources, assessing and selecting resources, creating and editing resources, structuring resources and sharing resources. These are complemented by the meta‐activity of soliciting feedback. The findings illustrate how these curational activities are shaped by a diverse and personal mix of behavioural, normative and control beliefs. Lecturers emphasized the activities of searching for resources and subsequently assessing and selecting them, and for this, mainly considered content‐focused beliefs about student learning outcomes, quality of resources and resource availability. This may reflect the nature of curation: even within student‐focused approaches of education, lecturers believe that learning requires a foundation of appropriate content, leading to content‐focused beliefs being particularly salient. Subsequently, structuring and sharing resources receive less explicit attention and may be embedded in routine classroom practice rather than part of deliberate curation, even though this contradicts views that offering organization, structure and context when sharing resources is important for students' learning. Overall, the study shows that curational behaviour is a multifaceted and belief‐driven process, calling for flexible, belief‐aware conceptual models for curriculum design as well as professional development as institutions adapt to evolving resource ecosystems.