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MERLOT AFRICA NETWORK
The MERLOT AFRICA Network (MAN) is a Network of African higher education institutions affiliated with the Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT).The MAN organization works collaboratively with MERLOT partner institutions to conduct educational research that leads to best practices in the scholarship of teaching and learning using electronic resources. MAN also strives to enhance the usability and quality of the MERLOT e-learning repository for global access.
The ultimate goal of MAN is to promote the formation of cross-cultural collaborative network of scholars and higer education faculty. MAN will implement a comprehensive research program aiming to evaluate the feasibility and assessing the needs for successfully implementing the following sub-goals.
- Encourage the development and sharing of quality
electronic learning resources. - Develop and validate research instruments to assess
the e-learning readiness of MAN institutions. - Identify professional development needs for integrating modular instructional resources in instructional design and delivery.
- Build capacity to train instructors, faculty, and teachers in the effective use of
e-learning resource repositories to develop online courses. - Initiate International collaborations and linkages between MERLOT and MAN institutions.
- Leverage the availability of open source software (OSS) to facilitate course management and delivery.
- Disseminate research findings and best practices through publications, yearly presentations and forums at academic venues including MERLOT and elearning
Africa International conferences. - Disseminate methodology and findings through doctoral dissertations and master thesis chaired by faculty researchers of MAN and MERLOT.
- Enhancing the usability of the MERLOT repository to accommodate Multilanguage audience.
MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching) Organization
MERLOT (www.merlot.org) is an international cooperative of professional discipline communities of faculty, staff and students from around the world and industry partners who collaborate to collect and make freely available high-quality online resources and share pedagogy to improve learning and teaching within higher education. The functionalities of the MERLOT e-learning repository provides environments for adding annotations to learning resources such as discipline communities peer reviews, assignments, comments and a ranking system which enables users to judge the quality and relevancy rating of resources for teaching and learning. Qualified faculty members in the relevant discipline editorial boards contribute peer reviews of material. Peer review editorial boards in 15 fields including, science, mathematics, engineering, technology (SMET) disciplines as well as business, teacher education, world languages and faculty development are responsible for developing evaluation standards and conducting peer reviews of materials for that discipline and manning their own educational portals. MERLOT convenes the annual MERLOT International Conference where community members share best practices regarding instruction and pedagogy, authoring and developing online learning materials, learning communities, digital libraries, e-learning and standards. Integral to its education and outreach efforts are its annual workshops for faculty development professionals and librarians.
Globe (Global Learning Object Brokerage Exchange)
GLOBE (www.globe-info.org/globe/go) is an alliance established among five international global repositories including MERLOT in the U.S, ARIADNE (Alliance of Remote Instructional Authoring and Distribution Networks of Europe) in Europe, Education Network Australia (EdNA Online) in Australia, LORNET in Canada and National Institute of Multimedia Education (NIME) in Japan. Federated community search is provided through the MERLOT repository that enables users to query GLOBE for educational resources that faculty can use to design learning experiences.
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Joining MAN is Free!
Joining the MAN institutional network is a two-step process including filling out a MAN application that concludes with the signing of a Memorandum of understanding between your oraganization and the MERLOT organization.
MAN on the News
2. MAN at MIC2007 (Merlot International Conference 2007)