Putting Educational Innovations into Practice.

2011 Summer/Fall GRAPE Camps

Please introduce yourself and tell us a little about yourself. We have a number of people who are doing GRAPE Camp asynchronously and you can communicate with them this way.

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Cathy Swift on July 21, 2011 at 7:53am

Welcome, Tim. Our second Aussie camper. I think your analogy with a community college is pretty close, although we also have technical colleges (2 year programs) here in the U.S. What a great job to work with students on the one hand and then have the skills that you can help faculty with their online classes. We don't have a digital media group yet, so perhaps you can be of most help in Faculty Development, as they are always reviewing materials in that area.

Permalink Reply by Allison Selby on July 21, 2011 at 12:13pm

Hi Everyone,

My name is Allison Selby, from the Information Systems & Technology school, Kaplan University. My background is in Web development and graphic design. Currently my focus in on Human-Computer Interaction and some Web Marketing. While completing the comment assignment for this week, I found some great materials I plan on using in a class, which will be tremendously helpful. I look forward to learning more about these resources and opportunities!

Nice to meet you all!

Permalink Reply by Cathy Swift on July 21, 2011 at 3:46pm

Hi, Allison. I'm glad you were able to find something for your classes. Also, you'll be able to particpate with the IT Editorial Board.

I'm participating in the KU Village online conference in September. Maybe I'll "see" you there.

Permalink Reply by Frank Kelderman on July 21, 2011 at 12:38pm

Hi everyone!

My name is Frank Kelderman -- I'm a graduate student in American Culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. I have an MA in American Studies from the University of Groningen in The Netherlands, which is where I'm from originally.

It's great to be part of the Merlot community.I'm interested especially in its history resources, as much of my own work and my teaching is in history. My taking part in MELO3D at U of M comes from an exciting new undergraduate course on the American West that one of my professors is developing. More generally I'm excited (as I'm sure all of us are...) to use Merlot to develop my own teaching in new ways.

Permalink Reply by Cathy Swift on July 21, 2011 at 3:48pm

That's wonderful to get you in on the ground floor of peer reviewing, Frank. I'm sure some of the others don't know what you mean by MELO3D, but I do believe it is the MERLOT Learning Objects in 3 D project. UM has received a number of different grants in the past few years that involve grants and have built up a great team there who are working on learning objects (and also submitting them to MERLOT).

Permalink Reply by Corrie Bergeron on July 21, 2011 at 2:51pm

Hi folks. I'm a little behind in my homework for the week; hope to get caught up tonight. My name's Corrie and I work at Lakeland Community College, a couple of suburbs east of Cleveland in lovely Northeast Ohio. I'm an instructional designer and Blackboard system administrator.

I'm also the project manager and lead designer for one of the EDUCAUSE Next Generation Learning Challenges grants, Ohio Scaffold to the Stars. We're creating a system to tie faculty-created online content to other relevant Open Educational Resources based on learning objectives. One thing I'm very interested in learning is whether MERLOT has an "API" - a way for a a computer program (rather than a person) to search the repository for materials that match a certain profile.

Follow me on twitter: http://twitter.com/skydaddy

Permalink Reply by Cathy Swift on July 21, 2011 at 4:04pm

Welcome, Corrie. Your grant sounds very interesting. I am going to have to defer to our webmaster and have her answer your question about the API. I'll send her here to answer and have her post it here, too.

Permalink Reply by Corrie Bergeron on July 21, 2011 at 8:04pm

Thanks, Cathy.

Does MERLOT have an evaluation rubric similar to that used by Quality Matters? In the second video, the presenter "knocked" the Dartmouth plagiarism materials for a) not having examples and b) not being interactive. But the expectation of having examples and being interactive seemed entirely objective.

In a QM-style review, the background info provided by the submitter would / should have explained the rationale behind those production decisions. (E.g., there is a lot of variance between departments, so specific examples are more likely to lead you astray than help; ADA / 508 requirements preclude accessible interactivity given the library's budget for creating online materials - IOW it has to work as a PDF or static webpage.)

(I'm a QM certified peer reviewer)

Permalink Reply by Corrie Bergeron on July 21, 2011 at 8:42pm

SUBjective, not objective. Doggone cut-n-paste....

Permalink Reply by Marjorie Castillo-Farquhar on July 22, 2011 at 6:05am

Hi Corrie,

I'm also a QM certified peer reviewer, although you sound a lot more qualified than I am. I have a question for you (about Moodle), and I ask it because I've been looking for an answer to this question for several days now, have signed on to the community board to ask and no replies. A colleague and I are considering creating a class to pilot using all free resources, including the LMS (we use Angel at our college) and a facilitator in a Sloan-C workshop shared with me briefly that I couldn't share a Moodle class with others from my own computer. I asked a tech support person about this and he said that I could if I did an install and then a re-install. I think I'm talking about "hosting" myself, but I'm not clear on the terminology. Do you know how this works, and if so, would you be willing to explain this to me. Thanks. Good to meet you here!

Marjorie

Permalink Reply by Corrie Bergeron on July 22, 2011 at 6:14am

Hi, Marjorie.

I don't know a whole lot about Moodle, but I know that it runs on a web server. So if your machine is set up to be a server that others can log into (I wouldn't use my personal workstation), then the Moodle instance should be accessible from the outside. But that very well may be a parameter that's set at installation, rather than a switch in a config file.

If I was going to do something like that, I'd find an older machine (3 yrs, say), put Linux and Apache on it, and sweet-talk the network folks into hooking it up.

As to qualifications, don't sell yourself short. I happen to have had a lot of experience looking at courseware, but that's mostly because I've been in the ed tech industry since the Apple II was the hot new toy. :-)

Permalink Reply by Cathy Swift on July 22, 2011 at 9:27am

Hi, Corrie:

The guidelines we use for review are the ones we looked at in today's webinar. Keep in mind also that QM looks at complete courses, while we review small pieces that can be incorporated into courses or classes. Also, we established the MERLOT Peer Review Process back in 1999, prior to QM. We don't have the expertise (in reviewers) to determine the ADA/508 standards. However, if a reviewer has qualifications to assess that, they are certainly welcome.

Yes, there probably is some objectivity in our reviews. Also, the submitter sometimes doesn't provide a very accurate description of the material, so we do in the review.

I hope that answers your questions. Perhaps with your QM experience you can make some suggestions for improving our process. We're always open to that.