15% Solution

MERLOT tracks Member participation in the services offered on this website and automatically presents Contributors with awards commensurate with their participation. A goal of MERLOT is to increase the number of faculty who successfully use of academic technology in higher education.  Our target is to achieve a “15% solution” where 150,000 faculty of the 1 million faculty members in North America are certified as having demonstrated skills in academic technology within 5 years.

The collective expertise of faculty using academic technology successfully is a major critical factor for higher education’s improvement and transformation. A principle of the program is that faculty who publicly demonstrate and receive public recognition of their academic technology skills become models and effectively teach other faculty how to use academic technology.

By developing a critical mass of academic technology-skilled faculty, a community of faculty leaders will be created and the community can sustain efforts to transform higher education practices through technology.  Institutional Partners and MERLOT will be able to mobilize members of MERLOT to advance the collective capabilities of academics to put academic technologies into sustainable practice.

Some Program Outcomes

• Higher education institutions will have a valid and reliable means for having external recognition and “credentialing” of their faculty’s academic technology competencies.
• MERLOT Project Directors will be able to identify their leading faculty and will know what they did to obtain recognition within MERLOT.  By knowing the capabilities of their academic technology leaders, institutions will be able to mobilize their faculty more effectively to advance institutional academic technology initiatives.
• MERLOT will identify the MERLOT leaders and can then develop special communications, invitations, and support services to aid their advanced professional development and MERLOT’s initiatives.
• Collective participation in MERLOT will increase and result in a sustainable service for delivering quality, online digital library and professional development services cost effectively. 

Academic Technology Competencies of the Faculty Community

• Discovery and Research for Teaching
• Design of the Learning Experience
• Teaching
• Learning
• Assessment, Evaluation and Feedback

Quantifying Participation in MERLOT

MERLOT provides its members a number of defined ways to participate in the MERLOT community.  Below is an overview of the different types of member profiles.  which have their own set of requirements and will be operationalized by specific user behavior in MERLOT.  If a MERLOT member reliably demonstrates these behaviors, MERLOT certifies the member as achieving a level of academic technology competency. 

• Contributors - Submit Learning Materials, Learning Assignments and Member Comments.
• Evaluators - Participate in the Peer Review Process of MERLOT
• Authors -Create their own Learning Materials and submit them to MERLOT
• Faculty Developers and Catalysts - Help teach others to use MERLOT Learning Materials in their classrooms
• Project Directors - Represent our MERLOT Academic Partners and help determine the strategic direction of MERLOT

Revised 6/3/08 - CS