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.

Carnegie Mellon University's Open Learning Initiative have a strong history of developing tools that effectively support student learning at scale. CMU delivers 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.

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 7 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.