Summary

MERLOT stands for Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching and was startet at Sonoma State University. It was created to provide “tools to enable the formation of communities engaged in building shared knowledge bases of learning materials.” A community of staff, volunteers and members work on providing openly licensed teaching and learning materials. A broad variety of disciplines is covered in the extensive collection of resources. Parallely, a vast variety of material types (animations, assessment tools, assignments, courses, quizzes…) is made available. Herein, K-12 materials are also available. Materials have either been created by the MERLOT community or is implemented by linking to another resource. The extensive (peer) review process is particularly emphasised and thoroughly explained. 20 editorial boards including groups of Peer Reviewers develop evaluation standards, conduct and report evaluations. In addition, “crowd sources reviews” are enabled by allowing members to rate, comment and discuss materials. Several modes for community networking and collaboration have been developed. The website can be translated into over 100 different languages, additionally, members can be browsed by the languages they speak. Hence, multilingualism is particularly acknowledged on MERLOT. MERLOT states to address many accessibility requirements in terms of the implementation of the website.

https://www.merlot.org/merlot/