About The Partnerships
About The Partnerships
Empowering Educators Through Collaboration
Universities and higher education leaders drive effective course material development by gathering real-time classroom feedback to ensure courseware remains relevant and impactful. This collaborative alliance enhances teaching and learning experiences, supports implementation, and connects educators with a peer community and research opportunities.
Arizona State University and Carnegie Melon University are well-suited to lead this courseware alliance, leveraging their expertise in educational innovation. ASU’s ETX Center and CMU’s Open Learning Initiative have a strong history of developing tools that effectively support student learning at scale. Centered around these institutions, the alliance benefits from a commitment to producing accessible, high-quality courseware that meets the varied needs of today’s students.
Since 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 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
INFLUENCING PARTNERS: One of MERLOT’s partnership priorities is to engage with commercial academic technology enterprises early in their design process so that they create products and services that better align with the academic needs of faculty and students from the start. By contributing the faculty voice of MERLOT’s community early, the investments in academic technology innovation should result in benefits for faculty and students, and not burdens.
For the last 6 years, MERLOT has been collaborating with Partners-in-Publishing (PIP), a company whose mission is to provide technical assistance, market analyses, training services, and more for academic technology business, especially when new products and services are being developed and launched. In short, PIP is a conduit for MERLOT’s productive engagement with companies to produce more Affordable Learning Solutions. PIP recognizes that MERLOT’s leadership and faculty community is a source of expertise and experience that can provide the academic wisdom for effective innovations. MERLOT recognizes the PIP can be the partner who can invite MERLOT’s leadership and faculty community into early stages of the development of academic technology services by commercial and non-commercial organizations.
Digital Promise is a nonprofit organization shaping the future of learning and expands opportunity for every learner by bringing together solutions across research, practice, and technology.
Digital Promise is conducting field research to inform refinements of initial versions of the courseware and devise a model for implementation to inform courseware-related training and adoption materials. Digital Promise is conducting this research with the support of a distinguished board of chemistry education advisors. To ground this work in the needs and lived experiences of today’s instructors and students, Digital Promise has developed a battery of instruments to probe students’ experiences in General Chemistry I courses and learning expectations as well as gauge instructors’ engagement in teaching practices shown to promote learning in prior research (“evidence-based teaching practices”).
Focused on increasing degree completion and academic success, advancing scientific research, and expanding engagement, APLU undertakes a wide array of projects and initiatives along with its members while providing a forum for public higher education leaders to work collaboratively to better meet the challenges and opportunities facing public universities.
APLU is a membership organization that fosters a community of university leaders collectively working to advance the mission of public research universities. The association’s membership consists of nearly 250 public research universities, land-grant institutions, state university systems, and affiliated organizations spanning across all 50 states, the District of Columbia, six U.S. territories, Canada, and Mexico. The association and its members collectively focus on: increasing student success and workforce readiness; promoting pathbreaking scientific research; and bolstering economic and community engagement. Drawing on the powerful collective action of its members, APLU’s advocacy arm helps shape federal policy that maximizes the positive impact of public and land-grant universities.
APLU is facilitating its member institutions adopting and implementing REAL CHEM with the support of professional development and cross-institutioal sharing of their practices, processes, and outcomes.