January 24, 2005

Gerry Hanley

Executive Director, MERLOT

NLII 2005

January 24, 2005

MERLOT: Slipstreaming to Success

January 24, 2005

Copyright Gerard L. Hanley, 2005. This work is the intellectual property of the author. Permission is granted for this material to be shared for non-commercial, educational

purposes, provided that this copyright statement appears on the reproduced materials and notice is given that the copying is by permission of the author. To disseminate otherwise or

to republish requires written permission from the author.

January 24, 2005

Slipstreaming Outcome: Improving Your Performance

By Leveraging Other’s Work

Process: Collaboration that can be…Cooperative to CompetitiveIntentional to IncidentalSynchronously to Asynchronously

January 24, 2005

Quick Tour Through the MERLOT Vineyard

http://www.merlot.org

January 24, 2005

Growth in Usage, Materials and

Members

Metrics 2003 2004Hits per month 1.8 M 3.2 M

# Unique Visitors 160,719 206,965

Registered Members 17,229 22,306

# of Materials 9,984 12,161

# of Peer Reviews in Process (Triaged)

5,984 8,557

# of Peer Reviews Posted

1,102 1,535

# of Personal Collections

1,083 2,336

January 24, 2005

MERLOT Consortium for

EducationType of Participation Numbe

rHigher Education (Systems & Campuses)

23

Digital Libraries 6

Academic Professional Societies 9

Academic Industry 22

# of Editorial Board Members 272

http://taste.merlot.org

January 24, 2005

Our Strategic Services…

• Providing Digital Library Collections and Services • Providing & Enabling Professional Development and Outreach• Leading Community and Collaboration• Implementing Enabling Technologies

January 24, 2005

…To Enable Successful Education

Step I: Discovery & Research for TeachingStep II: Designing the Learning ExperienceStep III: TeachingStep IV: LearningStep V: Feedback, Assessment, &

Evaluation

Enabling faculty to be effective and efficient in the use of technology in teaching and learning is key

January 24, 2005

Slipstreaming Digital Library

Services• Increasing access to other Digital

Libraries via Federated Search– Edna (Australia) - ARIADNE (EU)– CAUSE (statistics)- COMPadre (physics)– SMETE (sciences) - Unv of North Carolina

• In the works:– HEAL (health sciences)– CLOE – Cooperative Learning Object Exchange

Canada– ATHE (theatre – to build collection within

MERLOT)

January 24, 2005

Slipstreaming Digital Library

Services• MERLOT is available through your library

search tools to provided integrated access with your institutional collections– Exlibrus- Metalib– Sentient Discover: provides plug-in into WebCT and Bb

• RSS Feeds: The learning object newspaper delivered to your website’s doorstep– 220 unique requesters in 2004– WebCT, Bb, D2L have MERLOT RSS feeds that faculty

can choose to display within their courses.

January 24, 2005

Leveraging the World’s Collection of

Learning Objects Global Learning Object Brokered

Exchange to expand the quantity and quality of online educational resources that can be easily incorporated into faculty designed courses.

• ARIADNE (European Union), EdNA (Australia), eduSource (Canada), NIME (Japan), and MERLOT (US) are the founding “stewards” of GLOBE.– Partnership of digital libraries that have sustained

institutional constituents

January 24, 2005

January 24, 2005

Building the Slipstream

• Technology Team will adopt standard GLOBE technology protocols

• Business Plan Team will finalize business plan for GLOBE (governance, scope of services, roadmap for implementation)

• Who can we learn from while innovating?– IMS: Standard will enable easy community

participation.– Sun Microsystems: Federated search

expertise – Sun is a MERLOT Corporate Community

Partner

January 24, 2005

Working with Publishers

• Faculty want choice to use a blend of commercial publisher materials and MERLOT resources. What are the issues and reactions?

• McGraw Hill became a Corporate Community Partner in 2004– Test contributions of McGraw Hill in

MERLOT– Examine use of McGraw Hill-CISCO

learning system services• O’Reilly Advisory Board - SafariU

January 24, 2005

Working with IBM

• How do the commercial content providers and users respect and protect IP?

• MERLOT-IBM Field Testing of Prototype Solution– In early 2003, MERLOT and IBM formed an

agreement to build a prototype “digital content exchange” to test whether such an exchange was technically feasible and would have academic acceptance

– MERLOT supplied the requirements and content – IBM supplied the technical infrastructure and

technical support– Prototype was tested by members of MERLOT

institutions and concluded in April, 2004

January 24, 2005

Key Conclusions from Field Test

• Key requirements of the exchange can be supported in the infrastructure

• Providers and consumers (faculty and students) found value in the system

• Ease of use is a (the) significant acceptance factor

• While the opportunity to create new business models abounds within the exchange, there is limited understanding about which models will succeed

January 24, 2005

Enabling Discovery & Research for

Teaching• Slipstreaming with Institutions,

Professional Societies, and Corporations is critical for:– Federated Search: Increasing access to

collection without all the work– Collection development: Blending

commercial and non-commercial materials– DRM: Protecting IP– eCommerence & supporting usable

workflow

January 24, 2005

Slipstreaming Professional

Development and Outreach

• MERLOT Institutional Partners are the keys for faculty development– Systems’ and Campuses’ Faculty Development

Programs– CSU-CATS & MERLOT-CATS– MERLOT International Conference

• TLT Group: Delivering quality services to a network of “ready” institutions and faculty– Discounts on services– Joint MERLOT-TLT programs delivered

• Consulting/Advice• Online seminars

January 24, 2005

Slipstreaming Professional

Development and Outreach

• Communications Program– MERLOT “PORTALS”– MERLOT Newsletters (The Grapevine)– MERLOT’s Need:

• Deliver a large number of discipline-specific publishing services to independent, distributed content experts

• Must be effective, usable, reliable, scaleable, easy to manage, and have low procurement and operational costs.

• Collaborations with Macromedia produced solutions to managing outreach and professional development resources

January 24, 2005

In 36 hours….The newsletter was sent out to approximately 21,000

members. • 102 people unsubscribed to the newsletter. • 12 non-MERLOT members people subscribed to the

newsletter• 52 people joined MERLOT within the last day after the

newsletter went out. Usually we get about 15 a day.• 48 NEW Personal Collections created• 8 sent email with positive comments about how much

they liked the newsletter and the sense of community.

• 3 sent "negative comments" These included the use of too many acronyms or their email was empty.

• 2 wanted to know how to contribute material to subsequent newsletter

January 24, 2005

Quick Observation on Student Use

of MERLOT

18% of MERLOT Members are Registered as Students

Opportunity to Slipstream with NLII’s focus on student learning?

January 24, 2005

Students Reflecting on Learning

Angela Landsman, MERLOT Student Member commenting on her learning from a DNA Website

• “I am a fourth year college student. I was instructed by my college professor to join merlot and to review three websites and pick my favorite.”

• “The webpages were setup in such a way that you don't realize how much you are learning until you have completed the "lesson"….. I found it much more effective to "view" the experiments rather than merely hear about them. The videos and sound were excellent and I appreciated the animation allowing me to move at my own pace. I was not forced to move through too quickly…”

January 24, 2005

Moving From…

Your CampusCommunity &

Academic Culture

Mass = 1

January 24, 2005

To Here….

Mass = Education Community

Mass = Education Practices