Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT)

http://www.merlot.org/

Locating and evaluating online materials with standard web search engines is usually inefficient and time consuming. Quality teaching materials that assist teachers with integrating this reliable online content are an invaluable resource, but such online lessons are not easy to find. Searching for relevant information on the web can benefit from the availability of portals, websites that are entry points to other useful websites. MERLOT guide teachers to such teaching materials that are appropriate for them to assign in their courses and provides them with peer reviews that help them evaluate these teaching materials.

MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching) is a non-profit organization dedicated to creating an online center for college-level peer-reviewed online learning modules. The review rating process along with easy-to-use database structure allows teachers to easily locate and find high-quality online materials with evaluations for use. In brief, it is a Web-based free open educational resource designed for instructors and students in higher education that aims to diminish the difficulties in locating relevant online materials of high quality.

MERLOT has advanced searching that allow teachers and students to search for learning materials by title, author`s name, subject sort, material form, material language, primary audience and technical format of material. Other search options include author's email, author's organization, source code, cost, copyright restrictions, content URL, peer reviews, member comments and minimum panel rating and minimum user rating.

MERLOT is a place for teachers and students worldwide to join an educational discipline-based online community where they can; discuss teaching and learning issues with colleagues located anywhere in the world, collaborate with them by sharing materials, comments and reviews, find and add learning materials for teaching and learning, add assignments to learning materials and add user comments to learning materials.

There are many challenges for teachers creating high quality learning materials in a timely and reliable manner, getting appropriate professional recognition for their efforts and providing evidence of progresses in teaching and learning. MERLOT goal is to enable teachers to easily and effectively select the best online learning materials for their own teaching methods and their students' learning needs and the learning goals of their academic program. It currently include over  4,000 descriptions of web-based learning materials, sample student assignments for using the materials, peer reviews of the materials, comments by users of the materials and over 2,000 profiles of members of MERLOT.  

MERLOT has two priorities. One priority is the peer review of online learning materials that helps in ensuring that learning materials are contextually accurate, pedagogically and educationally sound, and technically easy to use. Another priority is to engage teachers in online publication in an online collaborative and cooperative environment and provide a mechanism for professional recognition for teachers’ developers. Actually, MERLOT has made important progress in providing a free online collection of high quality learning materials to improve teaching and learning within higher education.

Break Down:

• The Good: Over 20,000 online learning materials from a wide variety of academic disciplines are indexed on the MERLOT site that can be integrated within the context of a larger course.
•  The Bad: No online learning materials provided with Arabic language.
• The Bottom Line: The heart of MERLOT is the collection of learning materials and the communities of people.

Rating: 4 (very good).

Done By: Bdoor (544).