One thing that is constant in education, society, technology and all facets of life is change. Monitoring the number of technological tools, articles and manuals, applications and other newly published educational developments can be an overwhelming task, even for the member of the most recent faculty, the educational designer, the librarian and others. We are delighted to share a little on the Merlot system, which provides a free and available tool for all users who help them easily locate high quality content and evaluated by peers for their use in teaching and construction of courses, content for professional development, and much more. Merlot also serves as a distinctly unique community of educators, teachers, students and professionals, where we can learn from each other and develop our knowledge within each of our individual disciplines.
Can you share a bit how the Merlot organization works?
Every month throughout the year, without exception, each editor of the Merlot academic disciplinesLike biology, engineering, IT, psychology and many other advice meet to reflect on different ways to best share the more than 107,000 individual and free educational resources that are discounted within the Merlot library. We are thinking about methods to promote the leading materials evaluated by peers; How to ensure that the documents we examine are assessed to ensure that the complete needs of access to users are met; Innovate methods to help users seek unique content via the Merlot portal, and more.
Every two weeks, the Merlot management team meets to examine the variety projects that combine with Merlot and Skillscommons, to discuss new projects and subsidies, to discuss the problems raised by our user communities, our partners, Merlot publishers and the examinators’ publishers and analyze the changes that occur in higher education throughout the world. The management of the variety of collaborative projects occurs by specific meetings specific to the project throughout the week. Our management processes for Merlot are organized by virtual meetings and communications. Our partnership with the online learning community allows us to bring together the wider Merlot community during the innovate annual conference, sharing exemplary works by members of the Merlot. The Accelerate conference of the online learning community is the place where we can meet each year face to face.
The Merlot itself freely gives access to everyone, allowing users to search by 24 different types of content, such as electronic books, articles, quizs, assignments, applications, etc. Users can also seek by the highest classification by peers, which is one of the ways that allow designers of teachers and educational to find a lot of time to locate high -quality and freely available open educational resources. The collection of free and open educational resources is continuously extended by members of Merlot. With more than 200,000 Merlot members recorded, increasing around 1,000 new members per month, the Merlot collection increases to more than 300 new documents per month.
How did you get involved with Merlot?
Gerry: A long time ago in a galaxy far, far…. (During the previous millennium – 1993), I was the director of faculty development at the California State University Long Beach and I started working with the director of academic IT, Chuck Schneebeck. With the Internet emerging as an educational tool and with incredible Chuck staff in a new distributed learning center, we have created a collection of online simulations, online biology laboratories. The sharing of powerful educational technologies that gave the learner and the teacher triggered the idea of creating a free and open online library of learning objects. With the financing of the State of California for the “integrated technology initiative”, Merlot was designed and deployed for the world and my first work was to develop and support the peer examination process and faculty development programs to help teachers go to digital educational equipment.
Sherri: I actually participated in Merlot in the past 24 years (I had to check my Merlot profile, which shows that I joined as a Merlot member in 2001). I first found my way to Merlot as an educational designer and a member of the faculty, while I was working to build some of the first online courses for my campus at that time. I became a member of Merlot (which is free!), Then several years later, when I worked to develop my group of colleagues who also worked with the OERs, I became a Merlot Pégetal for the Psychology Board. Later, I became editor -in -chief of the professional board board, supervising this discipline for Merlot, as well as the promotion also of being an assistant editor of the Psychology Board.
What do you think is one of your favorite features of the Merlot Oer tool?
Gerry: My favorite feature – WOW is difficult! What my favorite depends on what I want to do and as there are so many things that you can do as a teacher or learning, it’s different to say. With more than 200,000 members around the world in 194 from the 195 countries, the search for members is my favorite to find potential employees on projects. With our work with historically black colleges and universities (HBCU), the search for Merlot members allows you to find HBCU authors and conservatives from the OER content. If I try to replace my current manual with Oer, I really like the Finder ISBN of Merlot where I type the ISBN of my current manual and this provides me with a list of free and open educational resources linked to this book. And if the Merlot collection does not have what I want, the smart research of Merlot finds relevant materials in more than 80 other open libraries. Merlot Smart Search also uses a personalized Google search algorithm to find materials related to Internet education. I am always able to find something that will help my students learn.
Sherri: I love this question! I have already taught workshops focused on teachers concerning OER and deep diving in Merlot. One of my own favorite things about Merlot, probably because of the quantity of our teachers, is the advanced research feature, which is not only looking for in the Merlot reference system itself for all OER external tools, but research on OpenStax, but also on the OpenStax, Noba, Opex textbook site, and many others, all without the user having to leave the Merlot site. In addition, when a visitor creates a free Merlot profile, he can create what is called bookmakers for their subjects (such as development psychology), and easily as a bookmark all the resources located in Merlot, as well as those that Merlot has found other sites for them, all in the same place. I included a screenshot below which highlights the operation of this advanced research using the term research “states of consciousness”. Merlot easily located 8 educational documents within the Merlot collection, as well as 10 in other collections.
