The Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching – MERLOT (www.merlot.org) Announces the 2010 MERLOT Distinguished Partner Awards

Last year, MERLOT, the Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching, celebrated its tenth year as an international consortium - a distinctive set of colleges, universities, digital libraries, professional societies, corporations, and individual members around the world dedicated to improving teaching and learning through the effective use of academic technologies. MERLOT’s collection (almost 25,000 learning materials), community (over 85,000 members), and diversity (in disciplines represented, and institutional types from community colleges to research universities) are unmatched.

This year’s winner of the MERLOT Distinguished Partner is: The Tennessee Board of Regents. The award was presented to Robbie Melton at the Emerging Technologies Symposium, jointly sponsored by MERLOT and the Sloan Consortium on July 21, 2010 in San Jose, CA.
This award is reserved for partners with ten or more years of history as a MERLOT Higher Education Partner. The Tennessee Board of Regents’ participation with MERLOT has supported and provided exemplary and award-winning work by some of the faculty and staff who have become leaders in our effort. We are fully aware that MERLOT’s accomplishments are the result of the contributions, participation, and leadership from its membership and partners.

We are especially grateful for the service of Dr. Robbie Melton, Associate Vice Chancellor, Regents Online Degree Programs, who serves as MERLOT Project Director. While many faculty across Tennessee are active members in MERLOT, those serving on our editorial boards help ensure that the highest online quality learning resources are more easily found and used. Editorial Board members from your system include: Ed Perry, University of Memphis; Peter Nerzak, Pellissippi State Community College; Jim Formosa (deceased), Nashville State Community College; Seth “Skip” Sparkman, Volunteer State Community College; Jackie Gilbert, Middle Tennessee State University; David Stanislawski, Chattanooga State Technical Community College; Judy Johnson, Tennessee Technology Center at Crump; Tom Brinthaupt, Middle Tennessee State University; Sally Robertson, Nashville State Community College; and Margaret Choka, Pellissippi State Technical Community College.

MERLOT (http://www.merlot.org) is an international initiative enabling faculty to integrate technology into higher education. It is an online community of faculty and institutions collaborating to increase the quantity of high quality web-based, interactive teaching and learning materials. The MERLOT website is a free “gateway” for these web-based materials. Finding web-based materials to incorporate into one’s course is just the first step for faculty; faculty must also decide if the materials are correct, effective teaching-learning tools, and easy to use. A continually growing collection of high quality online teaching and learning materials is realized through MERLOT’s peer review process. MERLOT conducts the peer review of online materials and ensures reliable and valid reviews through the selection and training of the editorial board members as well as on-going support for the review process. The MERLOT Community offers additional services to both instructors and students that help improve the learning process.

For more information about the MERLOT Awards Program or about MERLOT in general, contact Cathy Swift cswift@calstate.edu (972) 363-2350