About OHSL-MERLOT and Sunrise Summer Internship Program

      Learning about the breadth and depth of cancer topics is an excellent foundation for students interested in health sciences and cancer.   Exploring the World Wide Web (WWW) to learn about the wealth of free and open educational resources on the topics of cancer is the first step in developing this foundational knowledge.  The OHSL-MERLOT project will provide the SUNRISE students an engaging and personalized learning experience that begins with students’ interests driving their learning, with the goal of the students expanding a free and open online collection of learning materials about cancer.

The next step in the OHSL-MERLOT project is to have the students organize, curate, and annotate the online resources they find on the WWW in an open, learning library.  By cataloging materials into the library, students will engage in a deeper level of learning and will develop their digital literacy skills that will prepare them for professional careers.

How will SUNRISE student participate in the project?  What open learning library and cataloging training will be available so students can develop their skills and knowledge?

MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching at www.merlot.org) is a free and open online library of learning materials for a wide range of topics. With over 100,000 materials across many disciplines and over 200,000 registered members around the world who contribute to the library collection, MERLOT is in its 27th year of providing free and open library services to everyone with an internet connection.   

Currently MERLOT includes over 10,000 materials in Health Sciences and about 500 materials in a wide range of topics on cancer.  MERLOT will provide the SUNRISE students online training (visa webinars and videos) about how to search for free and open online resources that interest them about cancer, how to curate and annotate (e.g. catalog) the resources in MERLOT, and to build their own digital “book shelf” of all types of online materials on topics that interest them.   MERLOT already has a taxonomic framework and annotation guidelines that will help students learn the skills at their pace.

Once students develop their proficiencies in finding, curating, and annotating online learning resources in MERLOT, the MERLOT team will provide additional training to students on how to build an ePortfolio that showcases their skills, knowledge, and contribution they made to bringing cancer education resources to people around the world.

Students participate in discussions forums during virtual meeting with OHSL staff about what they are learning and what they find interesting.   At the conclusion of the program, students create a presentation and deliver it to the student group, OHSL staff, and MERLOT staff, reflecting their efforts and their learning outcomes over the summer program.

In 1997, The Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT, www.merlot.org) is an international cooperative formed for the purpose of aggregating and making freely accessible high quality online resources to improve learning and teaching within higher education.  MERLOT’s organization and services are administered by the California State University and connect higher education systems, consortiums, and institutions, professional societies and organizations of academic disciplines, corporations, and individual members to form a community of people who strive to enrich the teaching and learning experiences with technologies.

MERLOT provides: 

• An open, online catalog of thousands of online learning materials.
• Quality assurance processes for the evaluating the learning materials
• Open community tools for its members to manage and personalize their use of MERLOT resources and services
• A directory of people with common interests in teaching and learning with online materials across a wide range of disciplines
• Technologies for customizing services for our partners
• Professional development services for our partners
• User-friendly authoring tools to create open educational resources
• Leadership opportunities for individuals and institutional to put educational innovations into practice

Visit MERLOT and its Programs