MERLOT Awards: Application of MERLOT: Innovative Use of MERLOT

The Innovative Use of MERLOT Award is given to an individual, department, or program that demonstrates novel, comprehensive, or creative usage and/or application of MERLOT materials and services.  Nominees must provide evidence of an impact on students that can be demonstrated through qualitative or quantitative research or anecdotal evidence. 

Virginia Community College System MERLOT Team – “Through the faculty development course, MERLOT 101 Online, authored by Dr. Laura Franklin and delivered from Northern Virginia Community College, the VCCS team has provided professional development to hundreds of VCCS faculty across the Commonwealth for several years. Laura Franklin, who delivers the course through Blackboard, is the lead while the other members of the VCCS MERLOT Team participate in the course as guest expert users.

MERLOT 101 is a unique, three week online course that assists faculty in building a collection of online learning materials relevant to their disciplines while engaging them in actively using and contributing to MERLOT. During the course of the class, it becomes a learning community for the faculty who participate. The VCCS MERLOT team all come in virtually and help the participants become proficient MERLOT users online. In some cases, the team members also get in their vehicles and drive to colleges to give face to face assistance on the course contents:

• Familiarization
• Creating a MERLOT Profile
• Search and Browse Techniques
• Making Personal Collections in MERLOT
• Learning Assignments

The fact that all of these individuals make themselves available to discuss MERLOT proves the course’s success in becoming a true interactive learning community. More importantly, MERLOT 101 provides the kind of deep learning that allows participants to really integrate MERLOT in their teaching.”  (Pictured above are Cathy Simpson, Bill Paquette, Laura Franklin, Idanna Hamilton, and Elizabeth Smith.  Missing from the team picture is Marty Zahn).

Moustapha Diack (Southern University) Mous is the guiding force behind the MERLOT Africa Network (MAN). (See: http://man.merlot.org)  MAN is a Network of African and US institutions affiliated with the MERLOT organization and is considered an Outreach of MERLOT to the African Diaspora. The four ultimate goals of the network are to:

• build a strong networked partnership between African and US educational institutions, including the Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) in the US;
• raise awareness about the potentials of “Open Solutions - OSs” in supporting eLearning capacity building, and to improving education and training, and promoting economic development in sub-Saharan Africa. OSs support the view that knowledge and the technologies that facilitate its acquisition should be free and open for use, to promote universal access and economic development.  OSs include Movements and technologies such as Open Education Resources – OER (Open Education Movement), Open Access to Scholarly Publications - OASP (associated with the Access to Knowledge Movement- A2K) and  Open Source Software – OSS;
• conduct educational research that could lead to best practices and models of teaching, learning and research using OER and OASP; and
• organize international fora and expert panels for sharing best practices and enabling social networking among our partnering institutions that can lead to collaborative projects.

MAN also organizes, as part of the MERLOT International Conferences (MICs), the “MERLOT Africa Panels” (MAPs) that gather ICT for Development (ICT4D) experts. The MAPs give opportunities to the African institutions and scholars, part of the network, to attend and present at the MICs. This gives African partners a unique opportunity to build partnerships with the US institutions affiliated with MERLOT.