Merlot Project

“MERLOT is a free and open online community of resources designed primarily for faculty, staff and students of higher education from around the world to share their learning materials and pedagogy…its strategic goal is to improve the effectiveness of teaching and learning by increasing the quantity and quality of peer reviewed online learning materials that can be easily incorporated into faculty designed courses.”

Your task is to contribute to the global body of knowledge represented by Merlot in your content area. Think about your classroom and choose one unit/activity to “investigate” and share with the MERLOT network.  You are not reinventing the wheel here, just taking a deeper look at your existing practice and beginning to think about connecting your work (in a “scholarly way”, as identified on the Bender and Gray reading) to theories of learning. The topic/class should therefore represent some of your “best practice” and be something about which you can think deeply. (Keep the unit/activity nice and concise and dig deep into how and why this activity is your best work.)

You will be provided with question templates to guide you in your reflection. The templates facilitate creation of comprehensive documentation of the process and result in a typical Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SOTL) project, with guides and prompts relating to the focus, approach, resources, challenges, and results. By providing a framework to reflect upon teaching and learning, the template allows educators (you!) to visualize and understand the process more deeply and raise issues for further investigation.

The first template you will use is the Project Snapshot.

Then, for each resource/reference you provide in #4 of the Project Snapshot, you will link to and complete the questions about Learning Resources.

Finally, you use the  Class Anatomy template for the topic/class.

After reflecting about this experience and deconstructing it through these guiding questions, you will be providing this information in the Merlot Content Builder.  After signing up for a Merlot account (if you have not done so already) click on “Access the Content Builder” in the right hand menu, and click on “New Web Page” to begin the submission process. You can get help on this process at the MERLOT Content Builder tutorial:
http://taste.merlot.org/Programs_and_Projects/QuickStart_Guide/index.html

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THE NITTY GRITTY (What is due when and where)

STEP 1:

Create 3 google docs (START WORKING AND POSTING NOW, DUE WEDNESDAY BY 4PM)
yourlastname_snapshot
yourlastname_learning (use this one doc for all of the resources you examine, just separate each with clear delineation)
yourlastname_anatomy

Use the templates provide above to “fill in the blanks” for your content.  You may wish to provide screenshots/screencasts of the tools you mention (not a requirement, but could be helpful to enhance the text.)

STEP 2:

Mike and Leigh will provide feedback to you based upon the content in the 3 documents (WEDNESDAY EVENING)

STEP 3:

Post your work into the MERLOT content builder and BE SURE TO MAKE IT PUBLIC, AND THEN REMEMBER TO “CONTRIBUTE TO MERLOT.”