Project MERLOT: Bringing Peer Review to Web-Based Educational Resources

The unprecedented growth of the World Wide Web has resulted in a profusion of educational resources. The challenge for faculty is finding these resources and integrating them into their instruction. Even after the resource is found, the instructor must assess the effectiveness of the resource. As the number of educational web sites mount into the millions, this task is becoming increasingly difficult. To address the problems of finding instructional sites, evaluating their educational value, determining their accuracy and assisting professors to integrate the resource in a learning environment, the Multimedia Educational Repository for Learning and On-line Teaching (MERLOT) was established. The MERLOT virtual repository (www.merlot.org) of learning objects is hosted by the California State University Center for Distributed Learning. The project also provides a peer review process to ensure the quality of the educational resource. ********** The exponential growth of the World Wide Web has resulted in a profusion of educational resources that are potentially useful in higher education. The challenge for faculty interested in using web-based resources as an important aspect of their instruction is finding these resources and integrating them into their instruction. Even after the resource is found, the instructor must assess the effectiveness of the resource. As the number of educational web sites mount into the millions, this task is becoming increasingly difficult. The unparalleled growth of the Web is partly due to the fact is that it is so easy and inexpensive to develop a web site. With the aid of inexpensive or free web editors, creating a web site is almost as easy as using a word processor. There are also a myriad of companies that will host a web site for very little or no money. Since it is so cheap and easy to establish a web presence, the number of web sites has proliferated. While using the traditional search engines can be useful in finding educational sites related to a specific topic, experienced web users know how difficult it can be to find relevant information. Search engine may find a few million sites it deems relevant, but it does not ensure the quality of the information on these web sites. Educators have a particular responsibility to ensure that web resources that they use in their courses are authoritative. The concept of authoritative asks the question, “Who says this material is accurate?” By knowing the background of the authoritative source of a work, one can judge how much one trusts it. For example, if one were to access the Microsoft[R] knowledge base (Technet Online, 2001) to look up information on installing a new Windows XP driver, one would tend to trust the information. When students access a professor’s course web site, they would know that the professor is the authority behind the information on the site. The professor’s students would know that they need to believe what they read, at least for the rest of the semester. Since these pages are probably posted on a university’s server, the reputation of the institution also gives it additional authority. However, until recently, there has not been any objective review of higher education web resources available. Even after finding an educational resource and determining its accuracy, the potential user must determine if the resource is effective in teaching or demonstrating the concept. A web page could be both relevant to your topic and accurate, but may not be useful by the target audience you want to use it with. If it is pure text with no interactivity, has inappropriate vocabulary, or is simply ineffective instruction, it may not be useful. To address the problems of finding instructional sites, determining their accuracy, and determining how to integrate the resource in a learning environment, the Multimedia Educational Repository for Learning and On-line Teaching (MERLOT) was established.