1. Designing for Openness

🎯 Learning Outcomes	📍 Guiding Questions
Explain how designing for openness supports reuse, adaptation, and impact Identify key features of reusable and adaptable training materials Recognise hidden assumptions that limit reuse and accessibility Make one part of your training clearer and more self-contained	Can your training be used without you being present? What makes a training resource easy to reuse or modify? What assumptions are embedded in your materials? What would another facilitator need to use your materials?

You have a training design. It has structure, outcomes, activities, and assessment. It works — when you are in the room.

But what happens when you are not? Could a colleague pick up your materials and run the session? Could you return to them in six months and remember why you sequenced things the way you did?

This lesson is about shifting how you think about the materials you create. Not as things that support your delivery, but as resources that can stand on their own — clear enough to be reused, adapted, and improved by others.

Why this matters¶

Most training materials are designed for a single moment: this workshop, this group, this facilitator. That is natural. But it also means the work you put into designing good training stays locked inside that one delivery.

Designing for openness does not mean making everything public or polished. It means making deliberate choices — about clarity, structure, and assumptions — that allow your materials to travel beyond the session you originally designed them for. When materials are open, they can be reused by colleagues, adapted for new contexts, and improved over time rather than rebuilt from scratch.

This matters especially if you work in a context where training resources are scarce, where colleagues need to deliver similar sessions, or where the knowledge you are teaching deserves to reach more learners than you can personally teach.

This lesson helps you move from...

"These materials work when I deliver them" to: "These materials can work without me in the room"

What openness looks like in practice¶

Openness is not a feature you add at the end. It is a set of design decisions you make throughout: how you write instructions, how you structure activities, what you make explicit, and what you leave implicit.

Think about flat-pack furniture. Good assembly instructions use clear diagrams, label every part, and tell you when you need a second pair of hands. Bad instructions assume you already know which screw goes where. Training materials work the same way — the more explicit you are about context, purpose, and alternatives, the more useful they become to someone who was not in the room when you first designed them.

There are three broad approaches to building your training materials, and most effective training combines all three:

Reuse — use an existing resource as it is, because it already fits your needs
Adapt — modify an existing resource to better suit your learners and context
Create — build something new when nothing suitable exists

You do not need to decide which approach to take for each part of your training right now. That comes in the next lesson. For now, the important thing is to understand that all three approaches benefit from the same foundation: materials that are clear, well-structured, and honest about their assumptions.

What makes materials reusable¶

A resource is reusable when someone else — or your future self — can pick it up and use it without needing you to explain it. That sounds simple, but it requires deliberate effort.

Consider an activity you have run successfully. You know the instructions, the timing, the common stumbling points, and the adjustments you make on the fly. But how much of that knowledge lives in your head rather than in the materials themselves?

Reusable materials tend to share a few characteristics. Instructions are written out rather than assumed. The purpose of each component is clear — not just what learners do, but why. Context is provided: who this is for, what learners should already know, what they will need. And the structure is modular enough that someone could use one piece without needing the whole sequence.

This is a high bar to hit! But you don't need to be perfect.

Key takeaway

You do not need to make everything perfect. You need to make it clear enough that someone else can reuse or adapt it with reasonable effort.

Hidden assumptions¶

Every resource carries assumptions — about who will use it, what tools they have, what they already know, and what context they work in. These assumptions are not problems in themselves. They become problems when they are invisible.

A slide deck that references "your department's LMS" assumes a specific institutional setup. An activity that asks learners to "open the dataset in R" assumes software access and a baseline of technical skill. A case study set in a European university assumes cultural familiarity that may not transfer to a training in Nairobi or Jakarta.

The assumptions you built into your Part 1 design — about your learners, their context, and their constraints — are the same ones that shape how reusable your materials are. Making those assumptions visible is one of the simplest and most impactful things you can do to support openness. When someone can see the assumptions, they can decide whether to accept them, adapt around them, or replace them.

Here is a practical method for surfacing assumptions. Take one piece of your training materials and read through it as if you were a colleague who has never seen it before. For each section, ask:

What does the reader need to already know? Note any assumed prior knowledge — technical skills, disciplinary background, or familiarity with specific tools.
What does the reader need to have? Note any required tools, software, connectivity, or physical materials.
What context is baked in? Note any examples, case studies, or references that assume a specific setting, culture, or institutional context.

Write these down directly in or alongside your materials. Even a short note — "This activity assumes learners have basic spreadsheet skills" — transforms a hidden barrier into a visible design choice that others can work with.

Trying it with your own materials¶

Start small. Choose one part of your training — a single activity, a set of slides, or a facilitator guide — and work through these two moves:

Make one thing clearer¶

Pick the part of your material that relies most on what you would normally say out loud. Maybe the activity instructions are shorthand that makes sense to you but would confuse someone else. Maybe the purpose of an exercise is obvious when you introduce it verbally but invisible on the page.

Rewrite that one section so it could stand alone. Add the missing context: what learners should do, why they are doing it, what the expected output is, and how long it should take. You are not adding complexity — you are making explicit what was already there in your head.

Make one assumption visible¶

From your assumption-surfacing exercise, choose the assumption that would cause the most confusion if someone missed it. State it directly in your materials. This might be a note at the top of an activity ("This exercise requires internet access and a Google account"), a comment in your facilitator guide ("Learners should have completed the pre-reading on qualitative methods"), or an alternative suggestion ("If learners do not have access to R, this analysis can be done in a spreadsheet").

Think about future use

Would this material still make sense if you used it again in six months, in a different location, or with a different group? What would another facilitator need to know to run it without calling you first?

In practice¶

👉 Use Activity 13: Training Design Snapshot — pull together your Part 1 design decisions into a single structured summary before moving into openness work

Before you start making decisions about openness and reuse, consolidate what you built in Part 1. This snapshot gives you a clear reference point — and helps you spot gaps or misalignments before you start sharing materials more widely.

what to do: Gather your key design decisions from Part 1 into a one-page snapshot covering system, learners, outcomes, activities, assessment, and evaluation
expected output: A completed training design snapshot
approximate time: 20–30 minutes

👉 Use Activity 14: OER Workflow — start documenting the context for the material you are working with

This is the beginning of a workflow you will build across Part 2. In this lesson, focus on Section 0 (Context): identify what you are working on, what outcomes it supports, who it is for, and what conditions it will be used in.

what to do: Choose one part of your training and document its context — what it is, what outcomes it supports, who will use it, and under what conditions
focus sections: 0 (Context)
expected output: A completed context section for one piece of your training materials
approximate time: 20–30 minutes

Before you move on¶

You should now have:

a completed training design snapshot from Activity 13
one piece of your training materials reviewed for clarity and independence
at least one hidden assumption identified and made visible
a completed context section in Activity 14

These are starting points. In the next lesson, you will find and evaluate existing resources — and make practical decisions about what to reuse, adapt, or create.