One thing that is constant in education, society, technology, and all facets of life is change. Keeping up with the sheer number of technological tools, newly published articles and textbooks, apps, and other instructional developments can be an overwhelming task, even for the most up-to-date faculty member, instructional designer, librarian, and others. We are excited to share a bit about the MERLOT system, which provides a free, globally-available tool for all users that helps them to readily locate high-quality, peer-reviewed content for their use in teaching and building classes, content for professional development, and much more. MERLOT also serves as a distinctly unique community of educators, faculty, students, and professionals, where we can learn from one another and build out our knowledge within each of our individual disciplines.

Can you share a little bit about how the MERLOT organization works?

Each month throughout the year, without exception, every Editor of the MERLOT academic disciplines, such as Biology, Engineering, Computer Science, Psychology and many other boards join together to brainstorm different ways to best share out the 107,000+ individual, free instructional resources that are discoverable within the MERLOT library. We brainstorm methods to promote the top ranking peer-reviewed materials; how to ensure the materials we review are evaluated to ensure full user-accessibility needs are met; innovate methods to help users search for unique content through the MERLOT portal, and more.

Every two weeks, the MERLOT management team meets to review the variety projects that are partnering with MERLOT and SkillsCommons, discuss new projects and grants, discuss issues brought forward by our user communities, partners, MERLOT Editors & peer reviewers, and analyze the changes occurring in higher education around the world. Managing the variety of collaborative projects proceeds through specific project-specific meetings throughout the week. Our management processes for MERLOT are conducted through virtual meetings and communications. Our partnership with the Online Learning Community enables us to bring the broader MERLOT community all together at the annual INNOVATE Conference, sharing exemplary works by the MERLOT members. The Online Learning Community’s ACCELERATE Conference is the place where we get to meet annually face-to-face.

The MERLOT tool itself freely provides access to anyone, allowing users to search by 24 different content types, such as ebooks, articles, quizzes, assignments, apps, and more. Users may also search by highest peer-review ranking, which is one of the ways that saves faculty and instructional designers a tremendous amount of time in locating high-quality, freely available Open Educational Resources, or OERs. The collection of free and open educational resources is continuously expanded by the MERLOT members. With over 200,000 registered MERLOT members, growing at about 1,000 new members per month, MERLOT’s collection is growing at over 300 new materials per month.

How did you each originally get involved with MERLOT?

Gerry: A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…. (in the previous millennium – 1993), I was the faculty development director at California State University Long Beach and started working with the director of academic computing, Chuck Schneebeck. With the internet emerging as an educational tool and with Chuck’s amazing staff at a new Center for Distributed Learning, we created a collection of online simulations, Biology Labs Online. Sharing powerful instructional technologies that gave agency to the learner and teacher instigated the idea of building a free and open online library of “learning objects”. With funding from the State of California for the “Integrated Technology Initiative”, MERLOT was designed and deployed for the world and my first job was to develop and support the peer review process and faculty development programs to support faculty moving to digital instructional materials.

Sherri: I have actually been involved with MERLOT over the last 24 years (I had to double-check my MERLOT profile, which shows I joined as a MERLOT member in 2001). I first found my way to MERLOT as an instructional designer and faculty member, as 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, as I was working to grow my group of colleagues who also worked with OERs, I became a MERLOT Peer Reviewer for the Psychology board. Later, I became the Editor for the Professional Coaching board, overseeing that discipline for MERLOT, as well as being promoted up also to being an Associate Editor for the Psychology Board.

What would you say is one of your favorite features of the MERLOT OER tool?

Gerry: My favorite feature- Wow, that’s tough! What’s my favorite depends on what I’m wanting to do and since there are so many things you can do as a teacher or a learner, it is different to say. With over 200,000 worldwide members in 194 out of 195 countries, the member search is my favorite for finding potential collaborators on projects. With our work with Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU), MERLOT’s member search enables you to find HBCU authors and curators of OER content. If I’m looking to replace my current textbook with OER, I really like MERLOT’s ISBN finder where I type in the ISBN of my current textbook and it provides me with a list of free and open educational resources related to that book. And if the MERLOT collection doesn’t have what I want, MERLOT’s SMART Search finds relevant materials in over 80 other open libraries. MERLOT SMART Search also uses a customized Google search algorithm to find educationally related materials on the internet. I’m always able to find something that will help my students learn.

Sherri: I love this question! I have previously taught faculty-oriented workshops regarding OERs and deep-dives into MERLOT. One of my own favorite things about MERLOT, likely because of how much our faculty have always loved it, is the Advanced Search functionality, that not only searches within the MERLOT repository itself for all of the amazing peer-reviewed content, but also searches through numerous other external OER tools, such as OpenStax, Noba, Opex Textbook Library, and many others, all without the user having to leave the MERLOT site. Further, when a visitor creates a free MERLOT profile, they can create what are called Bookmark collections for their topics (such as Developmental Psychology), and easily bookmark all located resources from MERLOT, as well as those that MERLOT found for them from the other sites, all in one place. I’ve included a screenshot below that highlights the way this advanced search works using the search term “states of consciousness”. MERLOT readily located 8 instructional materials within the MERLOT collection, as well 10 in other collections.