A quick Survey of Online Learning & Teaching Sites

A quick Survey of Online Learning & Teaching Sites

An assignment in CEL 560 was to look at some online communities. Here are my notes.

Quick Look

First, I did a quick survey of each of the sites.

• Edutopia.org focuses on K-12
• LearningTimes.org is a community of education and training professionals.
• MERLOT.org is a large site, organized by topic and discipline. One discipline is engineering.
• digitaldividenetwork.org is an organization concerned with reducing the barriers to making the Internet and information available via the Internet available to all.
• LERN.org is concerned with providing a wide range of resources and access to all sorts of learning, world-wide.
• sloan-c.org is concerned with improving online education and access to that education.
• teachertube.com contains a vast number of videos, organized by educational level and subject matter. During my initial survey, there was a technical problem. I will check back later.
• groups.yahoo.com/group/Online_Adjuncts/ is a discussion board for online instructors.
• Classroom20.ning.com in focused on Web 2.0 and collaborative technologies.

In-Depth Review of MERLOT

I decided to go back to MERLOT because it is organized in a way that I can quickly focus on post-secondary education in engineering, which is what I do. It also is indexed on other specific items that I use.

The site is organized into three types of communities: by discipline, by workforce development, and by partners. I decided to explore the engineering discipline.

Engineering

Within engineering, there are five groupings:

• teaching,
  
• people,
• learning materials,
  
• beyond MERLOT and
  
• showcase.
  

There is also an opportunity to join MERLOT and to be a reviewer. I decided to join. The first item seemed to be a tutorial, so I started there.

About MERLOT

The first and last links were broken, so I started with “Using MERLOT …” This consisted of six different examples, some of which used Java applets and others of which were primarily HTML. None seem particularly innovative, but they would definitely be useful, for someone interested in the specific topic.

People

There is an editorial board and a set of volunteer peer reviewers. This is good, for faculty who want peer reviews of their work for promotion and tenure reasons. It is also an opportunity for faculty who want to expand public service by volunteering to review.

Learning Materials

Here, I found the statement, ”MERLOT defines a learning material as "any digital entity designed to meet a specific learning outcome that can be reused to support learning".
This is certainly broad enough.

The link to the collections did not work. Instead, I was directed to return to the home page, where I found a link that did work. The resources are indexed. There was a total of 6930 items under science and technology. Of those, 150 were found when I entered “engineering.”

The advanced search was more precise. I found 24 items under industrial engineering of which about ten interested me. Most were contributed by Dr. Hossein Arsham.

Assessment

This seems to be a very promising site for finding and contributing materials. The indexing makes it easier to find specific items and the peer review adds to the value of contributing materials, as well as assuring high levels of quality. I will definitely return here often.