The following activity is copied from an openly licensed short course on OpenLearn An introduction to Open Educational Resources (OER) . It neatly illustrates the process you need to go through to redesign existing OER to suit your specific purposes. You can choose to do this optional activity now or think about the implications of what is involved as you read it.
Allow between two and three hours
When working through this process of finding OER to reuse you would be evaluating material you find to decide whether it is relevant and usable for your purpose. On good sites there would be ratings and review tools which might inform your views on the viability of material you consider for reuse. It is unlikely that you will reuse an entire course in your material, you’re more likely to pick and choose relevant pieces which translate well into your context and this will inevitably result in writing contextual information to frame an activity or a piece of information. So although finding and reusing OER saves time creating something from scratch, you still need to allow time for critical evaluation of the material you find and possibly some re-writing.
OpenLearn - 4 Using existing free content Except for third party materials and otherwise, this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence, full copyright detail can be found in the acknowledgements section. Please see full copyright statement for details.