MERLOT partners and members are devoted to identifying, peer reviewing, organizing, and making available existing online learning resources in a range of academic disciplines for use by higher education faculty and students.
[1][2][3][4][5][6][7] MERLOT consists of a community of staff (at The California State University, Office of the Chancellor), volunteers, and members who work together in various ways to provide users of OER (Open Educational Resources) teaching and learning materials with a wealth of services and functions that can enhance their instructional experience.
Under the leadership of Chuck Schneebeck, CSU-CDL's Director at the time, MERLOT was modeled after the NSF funded project, "Authoring Tools and An Educational Object Economy (EOE)".
Led by Dr. James Spohre and hosted by Apple Computer, and other industry, university, and government collaborators, the EOE developed and distributed tools to enable the formation of communities engaged in building shared knowledge bases of learning materials.
Visitations to the CSU-CDL by higher education institutions participating in the benchmarking students resulted in interest in collaborating with the CSU on the MERLOT project.
Each Institutional Partner contributed $25,000 and in-kind support for eight faculty and a project director (part-time) to coordinate MERLOT activities.
[14] MERLOT has been influential as a model in the development of other online communities and resource repositories, including innovative collaborations with IBM[15] and the National Learning Infrastructure Initiative (an Educause program),[16] and as an important tool for educational reform (especially in STEM fields).