MERLOT Programs and Projects

.COMPASS: MERLOT's Strategy for Institutions' Academic Support Services
Collection - Community - Consultation - Customization Of MERLOT Partners’ Academic Support Services

Among MERLOT’s goals is to ease the burden on campus personnel in their planning and implementation of academic technology.   The same principles of reuse and not reinventing the wheel that have been applied to faculty-centered services are being applied to services for academic administrators and leaders.  MERLOT can help find ways to align with the work they are already doing and make their work more successful and take less time. For more information, visit the COMPASS page. 

Community Development

MERLOT is designed to support communities of faculty and instructors working together to identify and use (as well as develop) good online resources for teaching and learning.The collaboration within and across the discipline communities that make up MERLOT has been the essential ingredient that has helped MERLOT meet the needs of faculty, staff, administrators and other MERLOT users.

MERLOT Content Builder*

As a MERLOT member, members have full acess to the Content Builder tool to create learning materials. For more information about using the MERLOT Content Builder, go to http://taste.merlot.org/Programs_and_Projects/ContentBuilder.html. The MERLOT Content Builder is a webpage development tool that is integrated with MERLOT, and is directly accessible by registered and logged in members from the MERLOT homepage or a members profile page.  It is an easy-to-use template-based tool for creating web pages.  Complete, multiple page websites including a navigation bar, containing text, imported documents, and uploaded photos and videos can be created in the Content Builder.

MERLOT ELIXR

ELIXR is intended to develop and test new collaborations amongst faculty development centers and online resource repositories. The goal is to create innovative models for the development, sharing and use of discipline-oriented resources which illustrate exemplary teaching practices and which also support faculty with exemplary learning objects to help implement those practices with their students.

GLOBE

The Global Learning Objects Brokered Exchange (GLOBE) is a consortium of online services and tools that will provide an integrated search of learning objects for individuals and educational institutions worldwide. The consortium will provide a distributed network of learning objects that meet quality standards. By sharing the resources through a federated search, strategic alliances and technical interfaces need only be made once, but all of GLOBE benefits from these partnerships. For more information and a list of the founding members, including MERLOT, go to http://taste.merlot.org/globe.html.

Institutional Teaching Commons for MERLOT Partners

In collaboration with the MERLOT Project Directors and Editors, MERLOT has developed a service to enable MERLOT Partners to easily, effectively, and inexpensively customize and sustain the infusion of MERLOT services into their institution.  MERLOT’s Institutional Teaching Commons services is a partner-only benefit and will enable the MERLOT Project Directors to bring greater value back to their own institutions and become more successful stewards of MERLOT services.

For more informaton, or to obtain the teaching commons package for your institution, contact the MERLOT Webmaster at webmaster@merlot.org To see examples of other Teaching Commons that have been started through the CSU, visit http://www.merlot.org/merlot/communities.htm and select from the Partner Communities drop down.

Learning Management Systems

MERLOT provides innovative LMS opportunities to systems to present instructional materials to students for learning and online teaching. MERLOT has determined that through the marketing efforts of the leading LMS vendors, our collection and services will be exposed to hundreds of thousands of higher education instructors and their students, worldwide.

Authoring Strategies within the MERLOT Community

MERLOT has never promoted any particular learning material development processes, but has often been asked for recommendations regarding methodologies and tools for instructors to use to create such learning materials.  In order to address this growing requirement, MERLOT has formulated authoring strategies to build an understanding and foundation for those interested in developing online learning materials to select from among free, open access tools or proprietary, commercial ones.  These strategies also suggest tools for novice as well as more experienced users.   For more information, visit the initiative page at http://taste.merlot.org/Programs_and_Projects/authoringstrategies.html.

As part of our Authoring strategies, MERLOT has partnered with SoftChalk, a developer of content authoring software for eLearning. This strategic partnershiop will support the discover, distribution and sharing of eLearning digital resources. Go to http://taste.merlot.org/Programs_and_Projects/softchalk.html for more information.

 

MERLOT Technologies

Essential components of MERLOT are its underlying technologies. MERLOT works with its partner communities to continue to improve and evolve these infrastructure components and make them available in various ways to the MERLOT partners and others. Technologies include our RSS feeds, Federated Search, Blackboard Building Block and Web services.

.Open Textbooks Project

The Student PIRGs and MERLOT have formed a strategic alliance to further our mutual goal of getting more high-quality, open and online learning materials into classrooms.  The Student PIRGs, after five years of research and advocacy to address rising college textbook costs, are now looking to digital, open textbooks as a promising solution to rising costs.  This new alliance’s goal, aligned with MERLOT’s Textbook Affordability Institutional Initiative (see above) is to increase the number of faculty who incorporate open learning materials into their courses in place of commercial books by making Open Textbook content discoverable in the MERLOT collection.   For a sample of offerings available through MERLOT click here. 

In addition, MERLOT faculty members may choose to make a simple commitment to seek, consider and adopt open textbooks, in addition to other MERLOT resources, when appropriate for their classes by signing Student PIRG’s The Open Textbooks Statement. Ideally, our joint efforts will hasten the transformation of open textbooks and open educational resources into a mainstream, legitimate force in the learning content market.

As Student PIRG and MERLOT move forward with this alliance, we look forward to sharing more about our progress.  We encourage all MERLOT members to spend time discovering the open textbooks now catalogued in MERLOT and provide evaluation and commentary on these affordable alternatives to expensive textbooks.

Go to http://about.merlot.org/opentextbooks.html for more information and details on the Open Textbooks project.

revised 9/26/11 BBS

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* As of November 1, 2009, the Carnegie KEEP Toolkit is now the MERLOT Content Builder.