AERA 2006 - 2

Faculty Adoption of the Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching

Asil Ali Özdoğru, Stacey McCall, and Peter Shea

One of the largest and most widely known projects seeking to facilitate the integration of technology in higher education teaching and learning is the Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching. The project, begun by the California State System in 1995, has sought to make high quality, discipline specific online learning materials freely and easily available to faculty and their students. Through the participation of a large number of institutions – 18 system partners representing more than 8 million students, the MERLOT project utilizes a peer-review system that allows educators to locate, evaluate and use high-quality online teaching and learning materials across a fourteen discipline areas. The broad scale approach taken by the project leaders seeks to transform the use of technology in higher education and thereby transform higher education itself. Until recently, however, there have been relatively few larger scale assessments of the project from the perspective of faculty adopters. This paper will present background information, context, and evidence that begin to address this gap with survey results from more than 700 faculty located at more than twenty different colleges.

Keywords: Online learning, online teaching, learning environments, media

Citation: Özdoğru, A. A., McCall, S., & Shea, P. (2006, April). Faculty adoption of the Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Francisco, CA, USA.