MERLOT Innovation Programs

Institutional Initiatives Program

MERLOT Partners and their constituents can improve educational outcomes in a timely manner and reduce the cost of their academic programs through the integration of MERLOT’s programs and services into their own institutional initiatives.   Here is a list 5 of the 14 institutional initiatives identified by higher education that MERLOT supports:

• Course Redesign/Academic Transformation– Institutions need to redesign lower division, high enrollment courses to improve student learning with the support of technology.
• Accelerated Development of Quality Online and/or Hybrid Courses– Institutions need to support faculty, librarians, and academic technology staff in the finding, using, and designing of quality teaching and learning experiences within your academic programs.
• Effective Use of Learning Management Systems - Institutions need to support effective and efficient use of their significant investments in their learning management system by faculty, students, librarians, and staff.  Integrating academic content into sound pedagogical courses is a prime concern.
• Faculty Development Success – Institutions need to support faculty developing their talents and skills in using technology to improve student learning reliably and efficiently. The faculty development strategies need to be scaleable and sustainable. 
• Enabling Success of Adjunct Faculty - Institutions need to develop strategies to support adjunct faculty in the delivery of consistent quality teaching and curriculum.

Click on the following link for the full list of 14 Institutional Initiatives,

Serving MERLOT at Your Institution

MERLOT customizes its services to a partner’s initiative.  Over time and efforts, the MERLOT Partner Community has developed an institutional portfolio of strategies and programs to using academic technologies (especially MERLOT) to achieve their goals. For more information, see MERLOT’s Institutional Initiative Program outlined.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

 

 

revised 5/28/08 BBS