Scan the External Environment

Questions to Get You Started

As part of the process of embarking on your case study, scanning the environment to leverage existing knowledge can cultivate insights that might help as you move further into your study. Scan the web for organizations, projects, and documents to see what information is already out there, what other projects have done, and gain insight into your own challenges. Questions to get you started include:

• Are there any reports, studies, or articles that have been written about OER that are relevant to your own project?
• Are there people in the field from whom you might gain insight or reflections on your project or research questions?
• What questions have other OER projects asked? How did they go about answering those questions?

Pointers

Examples of external resources that can be leveraged:

• Other OER projects can provide documented insights and serve as discussion partners on relevant OER issues

• UNESCO’s OER Wiki provides narrative stories of how several projects have developed or used OER