The New MERLOT II (Multimedia Educational Resources for Learning and Online Teaching)

Recently, the staff at MERLOT introduced a new website and it is amazing!  Take a few minutes to explore at http://www.merlot.org
A screen shot of the new MERLOT, MERLOT II is below.  

If you are not a member, please join!  Membership is free.  It allows you to collaborate with others who have similar interests, create Personal Collections, and the ability to use the Content Builder.  The Content Builder allows you to build learning resources that are hosted on the MERLOT servers.

Consider adding new learning resources to MERLOT.  Those resources might be something you created or have found on the web created by someone else.

In preparation for the trip to India for the Indian Cancer Congress 2013, we are adding learning content related to India and cancer to MERLOT.

MERLOT Winter 2012 Issue Newsletter Posted

The MERLOT Grapevine, a quarterly newsletter, is now available.  It has information about the 2012  5th Annual International Symposium for Emerging Technologies for Online Learning , an announcement of a new editor for JOLT (the MERLOT journal), MERLOT Content Builder, and more.  It is a great resource if you are interested in online learning.

Common Cartridge

If you noted when I posted the update on the MERLOT Content Builder, one of the new features was "Common Cartridge."  That term is not very meaningful for most nurses and nurse educators - YET.  It refers to a standard similar to SCORM (shareable content object reference model) - but supposedly better.  It is difficult to get excited about standards except when they help with interoperability.

Common cartridge should be really helpful for colleges and universities who change learning management systems.  For example the University System of Georgia is changing from BlackBoard Vista to Desire 2 Learn. Of course, Vista has been retired, so it is not compliant with Common Cartridge.  Without having the experience, it is difficult to talk about the concept except theoretically.

For more information on Common Cartridge, read Doug Lederman's 2006 article in Higher Ed at http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/10/09/cartridge 
Michael Feldstein also has a 2006 blog on the topic at http://mfeldstein.com/why_teachers_unions_should_demand_support_for_the_ims_common_cartridge_stan/

Note those two articles were written almost seven years ago.  The process to disseminate the standard has been very slow.

The IMS Global Learning Consortium website has lots of information about the standard at http://www.imsglobal.org/cc/alliance.html