MERLOT as OER: MERLOT has been developing and sustaining its collection of OER for over 10 years, providing access across a full range of academic disciplines (e.g. art to zoology). Having free access to educational resources over the web is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the dissemination and transformation of the educational enterprise across nations, cultures, economic and social environments. Users can be faced with the challenge, “I found something terrific, now what do I do?” Users need free, web-based services to create learning/teaching curriculum from OER.
MERLOT: Delivering Open Educational Services (OES). MERLOT provides free building blocks for a simple learning management services that combined the library of OER and the Open Educational Services into a single, free, and easy-to-use system. The following use case describes how MERLOT’s currently available OES can be used for free to support educational transformation. Bineta is a secondary school science teacher at the “Pedagogues” high school located in the suburb of Dakar, in Senegal, West Africa, that has Internet access at the local “Internet Café” and library. She wants to develop curriculum for her 10th grade biology class using open resources. She’s heard about MERLOT and goes to http://www.merlot.org to build her course for her students. She clicks on “Join for Free”, and completes the registration process within 1 minute. She browses through the biology collection, reviewing the peer reviewed learning objects as her first choice for quality materials. Each time she finds a free learning material she feels is right for her students, she clicks on “Add to my Personal Collection”. By doing this, Bineta is provided a webpage that lets her add information about how she wants to use the material in her course. For example, for “DNA from the Beginning”, she writes, “This material is part of Bineta's 10th grade biology course for the “Pedagogues” high school. This material will be covered in week 6 of our course. Your assignment which is to be handed in on May 6th can be found in MERLOT. The assignment will describe the learning objectives, the instructions on how I want you to use “the DNA from the Beginning” website to write a report on DNA. Bineta is able to personally add this type of annotation for each of the materials she finds in MERLOT and organize them into a “Personal Collection” that Bineta names “Pedagogues’ 10th Grade Biology – 2008-2009”. Bineta’s personal collection contains 10 learning materials with their associated learning assignments. She has also contributed 2 new materials into MERLOT that she found on the web. She took the 5 minutes to add the new materials into MERLOT so she can integrate the new OER into her MERLOT curriculum. She realizes that MERLOT has substituted for a “Learning Management System” that she’s heard about but is too costly or too difficult to install and maintain in her suburb. Bineta has her students become members of MERLOT and write about how they learned using the materials in her course. Doing this lets her students develop some information literacy skills and her students can read what their peers are learning.
SPEAKER BIO :
Gerry Hanley is the Executive Director of MERLOT and Senior Director of Academic Technology Services at California State University Office of the Chancellor. He is also a Professor of Psychology at California State University. Gerry also serves as the Director, for the Center for Usability In Design and Accessibility (CUDA) at California State. Dr. Hanley received his Ph.D., MA, and BA from State University of New York at Stony Brook.
We Googled Gerry and here is what we found:
Gerry Hanley
