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Past Enhancements to MERLOT
Below is a list of development enhancements for the past few years.
October 2011
- Members can now select more than 1 discipline to identify their interests on their profile page. Members can also indicate which is their primary discipline.
- Addition of 500 OCW materials added to MERLOT. Click here to see all the Open Courseware materials.
- Career Counseling and Services subject category added to Academic Support Services.
September 2011
- MERLOT has made a significant change in our translation efforts by substituting the Google Translate with Microsoft Translation. With this change, MERLOT is able to now translate all pages including our Peer Review process. This will enable MERLOT to conduct reviews in multiple languages.
August 2011
- In an effort to keep MERLOT running smoothly, we had a maintenance upgrade to our application and database in August. You probably won't notice any difference in what you see on the site but it is working more efficently to better assist you.
June 2011
- ePortfolio added as a new material type. Many MERLOT Content Builder web pages being developed can now be classified as an ePortfolio when be contributed to the repository.
- Personal Collection web service added to the repertoire of web services offered by MERLOT. Updates were also done to the Advanced Search (member and material) web services. For more information on our technology services, visit http://taste.merlot.org/merlottechnology.html#webservices.
- Updated member affiliation list
- Addition of 1400+ Open CourseWare learning objects to the MERLOT Repository.
March 2011
- Content Builder - MERLOT members now have the ability to upload add borders to their web page boxes. In addition, web pages that are made public will now be counted towards a user's ribbon count.
- Federated Search - Wikipedia and Scribd have been added to the list of libraries searchable from the Federated Search page.
January - February 2011
- Updated Display Platform options - When performing an advanced material search in MERLOT, a user can specify specific display platforms including LMS's, Smart Phones and Tablets for a material. As MERLOT becomes more involved with Mobile computing, this is a useful option to identify materials that can be used other than on a PC.
- Language Preference - MERLOT members now have the ability to restrict material searches to a specific language. Members can specify this on their profile page (when they are logged in)..
- Advanced Search - Additional options have been added to the Material advanced Search page further narrow search results. These options include:
- Common Cartridge as a Technical Format option
- Delivery platform options for Tablets include Samsung Galaxy
- Content Builder - The MERLOT Content Builder authoring tool now provides the ability for users to upload .docx, .xlsx and .pptx files into their pages. MERLOT members can also download their Content Builder pages to Common Cartridge format.
- Learning Exercise Wizard - On the last page of the Learning Exercise wizard (which can be access from any detail view material page), members can now add a URL for additional information. This makes it easier for contributors to provide access to learning material details.
- MERLOT Taxonomy (Subject Categories) Expanded - Greatly expanded taxonomies in Humanities, Social Sciences and Arts. Workforce Development was also added.
Decenber 2010
- After a member adds a material to MERLOT, they are asked to add a comment or learning exercise for material, especially if they've used it in their teaching. MERLOT feels that if it is important to contribute to MERLOT, adding additional information would be valuable to all users of MERLOT.
- For those members interested in becoming more involved in the Peer Review process in MERLOT, they now can indicate that when joining MERLOT and the appropriate editor will be in contact.
- A Federated Search link has been added to all Discipline portals.
- Included "Add This" options on detail view page of materials to allow users to share on FaceBook, Twitter or a handful of other options.
- Updated optional information to describe materials added to MERLOT. This includes additional LMS's, Tablets and SmartPhones.
- Added another option in Content Builder for a navigation bar on the right for websites.
September 2010
- New Member types added including Content Developer/Author and Consultant
- Added a text editor to Member Comments page
- Link to Federated Search page from any page in MERLOT (from Search box at top right)
- Translate any page in MERLOT with Google Translate, including materials found in the collection or through Federated Search. Just look in the bottom left of the footer for the translate tool.
- Added MIT, YouTube, Flickr, OCW and OER digital libraries to Federated Search
- Updated Content Builder functionality and added How-To videos
- Ability to perform Advanced search on Learning Exercises in MERLOT
May 2010
MERLOT is continually striving to update the website with enhancements and bug fixes to make your experience on the site easier. Some of the enhancements and fixes so far in 2010 include:
- Partner identification upon log in. Now when you log in, if your affiliation is a parnter of MERLOT, you will see some additional informaiton on the home page.
- Users can translate pages at www.merlot.org into their language of choice. For more information on translation, go to http://taste.merlot.org/languagetranslation.html
- The Content Builder terminology has changed to better reflect industry terms that users would be familiar with.
- New digital libraries have been added to our Federated Search
- Web Services have been released which include material and member search, member comments, contributing materials to MERLOT, andn Joining MERLOT. For more information on MERLOT technology including our web services, go to our Technology page.
- A new member type of Teacher (K-12) has been added to better clasify users
These are all significant upgrades to the website to improve the user experience.
January 2010
- NEW and IMPROVED Lucene member and material search, including new default and resort options!! Searching is much faster and accurate to find members and materials quickly!
- Additional Sakai and Moodle as LMS options to the Contribute Wizard
- RSS feeds for materials created with the Content Builder
- RSS feeds for Learning Exercises for each discipline
- When joining MERLOT, you can ow add Consultant as a member type
- Users can hide their email address on their profile
- Users can specify their primary affiliation
- A Communication Science and Disorder portal
- Ability to "report inapproriate material" to MERLOT
- Conduct an Advance search for materials created with Content Builder
November 2009
MERLOT is continually striving to update the website with enhancements and bug fixes to make your experience on the site easier. Some of the enhancements and fixes so far in 2009 include:
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MERLOT Content Builder released (formerly Carnegie KEEP Toolkit). Users can access the Content Builder from the MERLOT home page or right from their profile page.
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New categories for the Geology materials, now knows as Geoscience
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Ability to search for members language in Advanced member search
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Ability for members to specify their level of proficiency in languages, right on their profile page
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Assignment are now called Learning Exercises and Assignments are a material type for materials added to MERLOT.
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When adding a material to MERLOT, a Creative Commons license can be selected from any country
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On a members profile and in the Member directory, there is a direct link to the materials a member has authored.
August 2009
- We continue to update material links in the repository and remove materials that are no longer available. To improve the integrity of the materials in MERLOT, we have added a "report broken link" link on every material detail view page. Now users can send us an email when they discover a broken link and we take care of it immediately.
- Assignments have been changed in MERLOT. They are now called "Learning Exercises". We have added a material type, "Assignment" to the repository.
- Now when you are looking for a material and find a bad link, there is a “Report Broken Link” link on every material detail page. An email will be sent to the MERLOT Webmaster, capturing the item material name and URL.
- Connexions (http://cnx.org) and LORNET have been added to the Federated Search. Users can now select those digital libraries to include when doing a search. For more information, go to http://fedsearch.merlot.org/fedsearch/fedsearch.html
- On a members profile, languages can be identified by which a member speaks and reads. Level of proficiency can also be indicated and will appear on a members profile.
- When contributing a material to MERLOT, if you are the author, you will be prompted to declare a Creative Commons (CC) license for your work. This can be done during the contribution process.
- New material types have been added to MERLOT to help users better define a material being contributed. Some of these include, Social Networking tool, Development Tool, Assignment, and Assessment.
- COMPASS, a new initiative for MERLOT, helps MERLOT members and partners explore open resources for your institution's academic support services and programs. For more information, go to http://taste.merlot.org/COMPASS.html
March 2009
- Translation can now be done on the MERLOT site and a user has the ability to view materials in the translated language. Simply go to the left side of the footer on the MERLOT site and click the English link. You will get a pop up with over 30 different languages to translate the pages. For more information, go to http://taste.merlot.org/Language.html
For more information on language and translation in MERLOT, visit http://taste.merlot.org/Language.html
- A text editor was added to the Description field of the Contribute Material wizard. This will allow users to insert special characters and hypertext links into their descriptions. A counter was also added to identify the character limit in the text field while typing.
- Over 500 material links were updated in the repository.
- Keywords can now be added to better describe a material when it is added to MERLOT and those words appear on the detail view page of the material.
- Now it is even easier to find members in MERLOT. The Affiliation selector you used to identify your affiliations on your profile is in the member advanced search to extend the functionality of finding other members in education.
- RSS feeds can now be obtained for members in addition to what's new in materials in MERLOT. All feeds can be found at http://www.merlot.org/merlot/rss.htm. In addition to the new RSS feeds, any search - material or member - can be turned into an RSS feed by clicking the orange RSS button at the bottom right of the hitlist page.
- Added 'Date Last Modified" to the assignment page so it is obvious the date of an assignment to determine how current the information is.
- Now when you are looking for a material and find a bad link, there is a “Report Broken Link” link on every material detail page. An email will be sent to the MERLOT Webmaster, capturing the item material name and URL.
- Phase I of accessibility changes incorporated into MERLOT. This includes being able to tab to each field in a form, alt tags for all images, redesign of Home Page links, images and buttons so it is obvious what is a link and what where the cursor is on the page. Links have a consistent look and feel; Some images that appeared to be links are now text links. In addition, Added labels to form fields for more descriptive forms when using a screen reader; as much as possible, made lists into HTML lists (using <ul> and <li> tags); made headers into HTML headers (using <h1>, <h2>, etc); added tabindexes to pages with forms for easier keyboard navigation.
December 2008
- When browsing for materials, you can see them displayed by subject category and by material type on the learning materials hit list page.
- Once on a material detail view page, you can clilck on the material type link at the top and see all materials in MERLOT with a particiular material type.
- Find out about a member by where they are from. On any member profile page, their aAffiliations are listed and include the city, state or country they are from.
- MERLOT has added serveral new subject category taxonomies to help better catalog materials added to the collection. These include, English, Faculty Development, Institutional Initiatives, and Health Sciences.
- Quickly conduct a search of members, materials or a Federated Search from the search box at the top of the website pages.
- A new material type for catalogging mateials - Open Journal-Article
- You now have the ability to add others personal collections as your own. When you see one from a MERLOT member, click the link at the top of the personal collection page that says, Copy Personal Collection. It will then be put in your list of collections which you can see when on your profile page. Once the collection is one of yours, you can add to it or remove some that you dont want included. At least this way now, you can 'jump start' your collections.
- We have included the ability to reorder materials listed within a personal collection. By clicking the little burgandy arrows to the left of any material listed in a collection, you can move the items up and down in the list. Previously they were listed in the order they were put in to a personal collection.
- Materials on MERLOT's website can now be listed with the Creative Commons license that describes the material. When contributing a material to MERLOT, you can specifiy if a material has a Creative Commons license associated with it and what that particular license is. The result will be an icon on the detail view page which describes that license and a link to the Creative Commons website.
- Trying to locate a member in MERLOT? From any member directory page, you will see a member search box at the top. Just enter the name of the person you are trying to find and if they are in the directory, you will seem them listed in the search results hit list.
- Member comments for a specific material can be sorted by member type. So if you only want to see comments by students or by faculty for example, you can sort them to see what a group has said about a material.
- With the collection growing for MERLOT, so do the types of materials being contributed. Technical Allied Health is a new taxonomy within MERLOT. See all the new materials and sub-categories.
- At our MERLOT International Conference each year, we recognize authors of materials found in MERLOT with a discipline award for their work. Some of the winners have been highlighted in videos that can be found in the About Us section at http://taste.merlot.org/merlotvideos.html
For more information on current enhancements, go to http://taste.merlot.org/MERLOTEnhancements.html
We hope you are finding your visit to the new MERLOT website intersting and useful and easy to find all the new features. We welcome your comments or questions to the Webmaster at webmaster@merlot.org
revised 9/16/10 - bbs |
