The education and training world is a comfortable place to live and work in when the resources you require can be picked off the shelf as needed.

However, off-the-shelf materials can be a problem for someone new to selecting prepared course materials. They have to determine the criteria they should use in justifying the selection (or rejection) of prepared material. This chapter explains a systematic approach to appraising the suitability or otherwise of this material. The criteria are based on the needs of instruction, of the teachers and of the learners.