MERLOT

MERLOT, or "Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching" is a free and open online community targeted towards those involved in higher education. Their mission is to increase both the quality and quantity of peer-reviewed OERs so that faculty can easily reuse and recycle the materials into their own courses. What makes MERLOT unique among the available sites which currate educational resources is their emphasis on peer review and the emphasis on community which accompanies it. Every resource posted on MERLOT has been vetted through a peer review process not unlike the method used for publishing in traditional academic journals. By making these academic technologies more palatable to faculty who are new to blended learning, MERLOT aspires to what they call the "15% Solution." Essentially, their target is that within five years, 15% of faculty in North America will be certified as skilled in academic technology, which will lead to systematic and reliable methods of "credentialing" work and expertise in academic technology.

MERLOT hosts eight main "collections" of resources: Arts, Business, Education, Humanities, Mathematics and Statistics, Science and Technology, Social Sciences, and Workface Development. The resources are also categorizes as "Discipline Communities," which include both curricular resources and human ones since MERLOT encourages users to make the most of the online community of members. MERLOT also publishes a quarterly online journal, the Journal of Online Learning and Teaching (JOLT) which deals with the scholarly application of multimedia tools in academics.