MERLOT!?

Wow! MERLOT is an amazing platform FULL of learning materials of different discipline, you can find materials to conduct courses, assessment tools, assignments and there are also open journal articles! The users put all these materials on MERLOT and share them with everyone within the community, you can develop your own materials, for example if you are interested in genetics, you can create some learning materials related to genetics and submit it, to be shared on MERLOT!

When I first saw the homepage and the amount of different tabs on it, I was thrown off my chair because it looks really confusing but when I took a closer a look, it was actually pretty organized into various categories that you can search for or explore! When the materials are submitted, people within the community can use them and then provide some comments on how useful the materials are, which is a communication mean between the users within the community.

On the left side on the website, you get refine your search based on what ever things you are looking for (there are quite a lot of materials that are available on MERLOT). I decided to just visit DNA from the Beginning, which is like a learning material where you can learn some basic information regarding DNA (it stands for Deoxyribonuclei Acid).

It is really well done and ready to be used!

On the main page, it even tells you who the target audience are and some other information as well!

Once you visit the material, the website will prompt you to rate it! And I guess based on the ratings of the materials, it helps to attract people within the community to look at the material. So it kind of serves as a way to promote the learning materials or tools. However, as we have previous discussed about the use of ratings, where it is very dependent on individual's needs and preference, it may not be a good indicator of whether a learning material is good or not. But I guess in a professional platform like MERLOT, I assumed that people within the community are more critical and professional in providing ratings and comments to these learning materials.

It is a good website where professionals working in the educational institutes or research field, can find inspirations based on the things that have been shared on MERLOT to design their own materials, or even share it! Even for people like me, who wants to learn new things, I could search for them on this website and read about things like DNA! Do try it out and it's free too!