Besides being a repository for online learning materials, MERLOT is engaged in many programs and projects to further extend the options and opportunities to faculty. These include:
The CSU’s Affordable Learning Solutions Initiative is designed to enable faculty to choose and provide quality educational content that is more affordable for their students. CSU students typically pay over $800 per year for their books. By reducing their expenses, we believe we can provide better access to a quality CSU learning experience. We launched this campaign in 2010 and will be continuously improving the services to CSU faculty and students each semester. The Affordable Learning Solutions website is designed to:
Community is at the core of MERLOT. The collaboration within and across the discipline communities that make up MERLOT has been the essential ingredient that has helped MERLOT meet the needs of the faculty and other MERLOT users. MERLOT is designed to support communities of faculty and instructors working together to identify and use (as well as develop) good online resources for teaching and learning.
MERLOT's goal is to eventually support communities for all disciplines. To date, MERLOT and its Partners have chosen to support more than 25 communities, most of which are discipline based. New Communities are added when a 'critical mass' of resources in a particular discipline or area have been identified and when people willing to focus on developing the Community associated with that area have agreed to participate.
MERLOT has developed a template-based customizable portal as a Partner-only benefit that can enable Partners to infuse MERLOT services into their institutions. The portal templates are a cost-effective, Partner-only benefit that provides a web-based, institutionally contextualizable professional development center for a Partner’s own, specific organization/campus.
The portals may be hosted on either MERLOT or the Partner’s servers. In either case, MERLOT provides guidance and assistance to customize and install the template, but the Partner is responsible for sustaining the content and services of the portal.
For more information contact the MERLOT Webmaster at webmaster@merlot.org. To see examples of California State University Teaching Commons, visit the MERLOT Communities page and select the Partner Community Type on the left side of the page.
Open textbook authors publish their text on the Web with the support of their universities, or other non-profit or for-profit organizations. Open textbooks are usually governed by Creative Commons licenses that enable users to freely download, customize, and/or print the textbook without expressed and prior written consent of the author. Publishers often provide free access to open textbook content while charging lower prices for supplemental print products and services. The inclusion of advertisements can also be a condition of open availability for such text. (See how California State University is addressing the open texts with their Affordable Learning Solutions project.)
The free cost of open textbooks can be a tremendous benefit to students -- especially in difficult economic times. For faculty, an open textbook can be a platform for integrating multimedia, making the content more engaging for student learning, and more effective for faculty teaching. Some open textbooks can be customized by faculty so they can design course content to their specific teaching goals.
MERLOT has one of the largest known collections of open textbooks in the world, with thousands catalogued by topic, audience, level, license, peer review, etc., many with comments, in bookmark collections, and user ratings. MERLOT community members can take advantage of this resource in a variety of ways. They can:
Participate in the MERLOT Peer Review process as a member of one of MERLOT’s Editorial Boards. These discipline-based communities are involved in discovering and reviewing a variety of learning resources, including open textbooks.