2. Finding and Evaluating OER

🎯 Learning Outcomes	📍 Guiding Questions
Identify and locate relevant Open Educational Resources for your training Evaluate OER using six lenses including accessibility Identify contextual assumptions in existing resources that affect whether they will work for your learners Make practical decisions about whether to reuse, adapt, or create resources based on your learners, context, and outcomes	Where can you find existing OER relevant to your training? How do you determine whether a resource will work in your context? What assumptions does a resource make about its audience? When should you reuse a resource, adapt it, or create something new? Can your learners actually access and use this material?

Before you start

Think about the material you reviewed in Lesson 1. Did you find yourself thinking "there must be something out there I could use for this"? Or did you assume you would need to build everything yourself? Both instincts are worth examining.

In Lesson 1, you started looking at your own materials through the lens of openness — clarity, hidden assumptions, and what it takes for materials to work without you. Now you turn that lens outward. Before creating or heavily adapting materials, it is worth checking what already exists.

This lesson is about finding existing Open Educational Resources, evaluating whether they genuinely fit your needs, and making practical decisions about how to work with them.

Why this matters¶

There are thousands of openly licensed educational resources available — on repositories, institutional websites, GitHub, Zenodo, and across the web. The challenge is not scarcity. It is finding resources that actually fit your learners, your outcomes, and your constraints.

A polished resource can still fail in your context. It might assume internet access your learners do not have. It might use case studies from a setting your learners cannot relate to. It might be pitched at the wrong level, locked in an uneditable format, or licensed in ways that prevent adaptation. Evaluation is not about quality in the abstract — it is about fit for your specific purpose.

Getting this right saves real effort. A well-chosen resource that needs minor adaptation is far less work than building from scratch. A poorly chosen resource that needs heavy reworking may cost more time than creating something new. The decisions you make here — reuse, adapt, or create — shape the rest of your workflow in Part 2.

Finding OER¶

You do not need to conduct an exhaustive search. Start with 1–3 candidates that look promising for one part of your training.

Where to look depends on your domain and the type of material you need. Open repositories like OER Commons, MERLOT, and OpenStax aggregate resources across disciplines. For technical and data-related training, GitHub and Zenodo often have openly licensed materials. Institutional repositories and professional organisations in your field may also publish open training resources.

Search effectively by combining your topic with the type of material you need ("data visualisation workshop activity" rather than just "data visualisation"). Adding terms like "OER", "CC BY", or "open license" can help filter results. If you are looking for something specific — a particular exercise format, a case study from a particular region — say so in your search.

Start narrow

Search for something specific enough that you can evaluate it meaningfully. "Climate data workshop activities for non-technical learners" will give you more useful results than "climate change teaching resources."

Evaluating what you find¶

Finding a resource is only the first step. The real question is whether it will work — for your learners, in your context, toward your outcomes. Use these six lenses to evaluate each candidate.

Alignment¶

Does this resource support the learning outcomes you defined in Part 1? A resource might be excellent on its own terms but irrelevant to what your learners need to achieve. Check whether the level is appropriate — a resource designed for advanced practitioners will not work for beginners, no matter how well-made it is.

Clarity¶

Can learners follow this without heavy explanation? Read through the resource as if you were a learner encountering it for the first time. Are instructions clear? Is the purpose of each section evident? If you would need to explain or rewrite significant portions for learners to use it, that is a signal — the resource may need adaptation rather than direct reuse.

Context fit¶

Are the examples, scenarios, and references meaningful for your learners? A case study set in a well-resourced European university may not resonate with trainers working in community settings in the Global South. Check whether the resource assumes tools, infrastructure, or cultural context that your learners do not share.

Adaptability¶

Can you realistically modify this resource? Some materials are published as locked PDFs or proprietary formats that make editing impractical. Others are modular and well-structured, making it easy to swap examples, reorder sections, or extract individual activities. Format matters as much as content here.

Accessibility¶

Can your learners actually access and use this material? This lens goes beyond content quality to practical usability:

Format and devices — Does it work on the devices your learners have? A resource that requires a laptop and broadband is unusable if your learners work primarily on mobile phones with limited data.
Bandwidth — Does it rely on streaming video or large downloads that are impractical in low-bandwidth settings?
Language — Is it in a language your learners are comfortable working in? Even when learners speak the language, dense academic prose in a second language creates unnecessary friction.
Assistive technology — Is the content structured so it works with screen readers? Are images described? Are documents properly formatted with headings and alt text?

Accessibility is not an afterthought. A resource your learners cannot access is not usable, regardless of how good its content is.

Licensing¶

Are you allowed to reuse or adapt this resource? Check whether the resource has a visible license. If it does not, treat it as fully copyrighted — you cannot legally modify or redistribute it. If it has an open license, note the type. You will explore licensing in detail in Lesson 3, but for now, a quick check is enough: can you modify it, and can you share your modified version?

No license means no permission

A resource being freely available online does not mean it is openly licensed. If there is no license statement, you cannot assume you have permission to adapt or redistribute it. Look for an explicit license — usually at the bottom of the page, in the repository metadata, or in a separate LICENSE file.

Making the decision: reuse, adapt, or create¶

After evaluating a resource, you face a practical choice. This is where the reuse/adapt/create framework from Lesson 1 becomes concrete.

Reuse when a resource fits well and needs minimal or no changes. The outcomes align, the level is right, the examples work, and the format is accessible for your learners. Direct reuse saves the most effort, but only when the fit is genuinely good. Forcing a poor-fit resource into your training creates more problems than it solves.

Adapt when a resource has clear value but does not quite fit. Perhaps the content is strong but the examples need localising, the sequence needs adjusting, or the instructions assume a level of prior knowledge your learners do not have. Adaptation is the most common outcome — most resources need some modification to work in a new context. You will learn adaptation methods in Lesson 4.

Create from scratch when nothing suitable exists, or when the effort to adapt an existing resource would exceed the effort to build something new. This is especially common in niche domains, for underrepresented languages, or when your training approach is genuinely novel. You will explore creation in Lesson 5.

A decision in action

A trainer designing a workshop on qualitative data analysis finds an openly licensed module on interview coding techniques. The content aligns well with her outcomes, but the examples use corporate HR interviews — irrelevant to her learners, who work in community health. She also notices the module assumes learners have NVivo, which her participants cannot access. She decides to adapt: keep the coding framework and exercises but replace the examples with community health scenarios and substitute a free tool for NVivo.

The decision is rarely all-or-nothing. For a single training, you might reuse one activity, adapt another, and create a third. Make these decisions part by part, based on what is realistic given your time, your learners, and your context.

In practice¶

👉 Use Activity 14: OER Workflow — find, evaluate, and make decisions about resources for your training

Work through Sections 1 and 2. In Section 1, identify and evaluate at least one resource using the six lenses. In Section 2, document your reuse/adapt/create decisions and surface the hidden assumptions in the resources you found.

what to do: Find 1–3 candidate resources, evaluate each against the six lenses, and document your decision (reuse, adapt, or create) with reasoning
focus sections: 1 (Find and Evaluate Resources), 2 (Design Decisions)
expected output: Evaluated resources with documented decisions and identified assumptions
approximate time: 20–30 minutes

👉 Come back to Activity 8: Learning Activity Design

what to do: Check whether the resource you selected can support one of your activities. If you chose to reuse, does the resource work within the activity with minimal explanation? If you chose to adapt, what specific changes would the activity need?
expected output: A clearer picture of how your selected resource fits (or does not fit) within one of your activities
approximate time: 10–15 minutes

Before you move on¶

You should now have:

at least one resource identified and evaluated against all six lenses
a documented decision (reuse, adapt, or create) for each resource, with reasoning
identified assumptions in the resources you found
a sense of what fits your context and what would need to change

These decisions are not final. You will revisit them as you learn about licensing in the next lesson and begin adapting resources in Lesson 4.