Grantee: P116B060223 California State University, Office of the Chancellor
The MERLOT ELIXR Project
Final Report
- Introductory Overview
Prior to FIPSE funding, a pilot project was led by the California State University system to test the feasibility and value of open educational resources in faculty development. Along with identifying a cadre of partners from higher education institutions, the MERLOT ELIXR team members produced a multimedia case story of exemplary teaching processes – active learning in a large Organic Chemistry class – that included reflections by the instructor and students on the effectiveness and quality of the teaching and learning experiences[1]. The MERLOT ELIXR project stemmed from the successful development of this pilot case story and the enthusiasm of faculty development leaders on seeing it demonstrated.
Since project commencement in October 2006, thirty diverse higher education institutions have created 79[2] MERLOT ELIXR digital case stories that highlight exemplary teaching practices. In addition, faculty developers discovered several inventive ways to integrate the case stories into their professional development efforts for individual faculty. The project results include supporting resources (handouts, guides, reports, links) providing needed detail for teams creating and applying case stories. In addition, faculty developers discovered several inventive ways to integrate the case stories into their professional development efforts for individual faculty, and some of their experiences were documented on two blogs. Four unique evaluation tools were also created and a group of fellows were recruited to assist in gathering necessary data. All of the products are freely available on ELIXR’s website for ongoing use.
Faculty – and ultimately students – at a diverse set of institutions have benefited from MERLOT ELIXR:
· Over 30 higher education institutions in 10 states were involved in creating digital case stories. These partners included private and public institutions, community colleges, comprehensive and research-intensive universities. Some of our most effective case story developments came from existing collaborations, including a discipline-specific Geoscience teaching portal[3] based at a liberal arts college, a new discipline-specific Economics teaching portal[4] which emerged during our project, several research institutions within the Texas Faculty Development Network, and the 12 public comprehensive institutions in the California State University system.
· The use of the digital case stories has not been confined to these partner institutions. Faculty development professionals have learned about MERLOT ELIXR either through recommendations of colleagues, our conference presentations and papers, and links from a variety of websites. Faculty at these institutions – and others who have accessed our resources on their own from the MERLOT site (www.merlot.org), the discipline portals and other online links – have also used the case stories to advance their knowledge of exemplary teaching methods. Since the MERLOT ELIXR project began tracking website usage on March 1, 2009, over 6100 unique visitors have visited our site.
· The MERLOT ELIXR project also had international impacts. Four universities within the Council of Educational Developers in Ontario, Canada, used the ELIXR methods and tools to create 9 case stories and a supplemental resource on Academic Integrity, which they are making available from our ELIXR website for broad use. Two ELIXR case stories – a College Algebra story and an Organic Chemistry story – are highlighted on the Guidelines on Learning that Inform Teaching website based in Australia. A Turkish university sent a faculty development staff member to participate with our staff team for six months in 2009 in order to adapt the methods and resources for use internationally, and we have had other expressions of interest from Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore and various European countries.
In addition to the project outputs discussed above, the MERLOT ELIXR project provided ‘added value’ to faculty development efforts, as indicated by evidence from the faculty development leaders who assisted in data collection for evaluation efforts. Two further evaluation studies[5] also looked at the impact of stories on individual faculty, and the studies suggest that faculty members did as expected “learn about the teaching topic and make changes in their teaching practices,” as stated in the Independent Evaluator’s Report[6]. The evaluation report also indicates that faculty members reported the stories were “valuable tools for communicating how to implement a teaching technique” (regardless of whether the faculty members experienced the case stories via the web or in-person).
Follow-up surveys with faculty using the MERLOT ELIXR digital case stories in a workshop setting indicated that the faculty had, when possible, “included one or more of the activities associated with a particular workshop into their class activities or they were likely to do so in the future[7].
Another part of the evaluation plan related to the enrichment of specific faculty teaching communities, such as the Science Education Resource Center (SERC), which has focused primarily on providing pedagogic resources to faculty in the Geosciences. Three MERLOT ELIXR case stories were integrated into SERC’s website, which increased access for individual faculty members and raised visibility for MERLOT ELIXR’s project. Links to these case stories will also be included in the pedagogic materials on the forthcoming Economics portal. Therefore, this partnership was an “effective means for contributing to and expanding access to the materials within a specific faculty teaching community”, as concluded in the Evaluation Report.
B Problem that project hoped to address
Our overall objective was to accelerate the adoption of exemplary teaching practices by faculty. The need for effective and efficient faculty development to accelerate the adoption of exemplary teaching practices has grown in importance due to the convergence of many factors. Regional accreditation agencies are requiring a culture of evidence for learning outcomes; faculty development is required to design and deploy effective instruction and assessment methods. The explosion in the use of technology to augment and mediate teaching and learning requires faculty to develop skills that were not addressed in their scholarly preparation in graduate school or professional organizations.
Centers to support the development of faculty as teachers exist within most of our higher education campuses and systems and are emerging as critical organizations in supporting, implementing, and disseminating instructional and academic technology innovations. One of the challenges for faculty development is to provide discipline-based examples of exemplary teaching practices and innovations, in ways that build faculty identity as members of both institutional and disciplinary communities of teachers. Most faculty members are better able to understand and apply an exemplary learning activity or innovative teaching strategy when it is illustrated by examples from their own discipline. In particular, digital case stories provide “virtual classroom visits” in which faculty members can see both the process and impacts of a new activity or strategy within their own subject matter context.
The MERLOT ELIXR approach was to foster the development and use of discipline-specific case stories on exemplary teaching practices through collaborations across institutions. No single institution could muster the resources to produce discipline-specific examples across the range of themes on which they seek to advance faculty members’ knowledge and practice; by collaboration on development and by sharing the resulting digital case stories, multiple institutions can share the load of creating and evaluating the open educational resources[8] – and many more institutions can benefit from the results.
Achieving our objective for MERLOT ELIXR required that we solve the following sub-problems:
· What factors in the design and use of digital case stories will accelerate faculty members’ adoption of exemplary teaching strategies and learning activities?
· What processes, tools and resources will be needed to create and apply case stories with these successful elements?
· What methods for collaboration will support engagement of multiple institutions in the development, review and application of digital case stories (in order to achieve the desired leverage from the efforts of the creating institutions)?
· What ongoing partnerships and structures can be developed to promote continued use of the existing case stories and use of the development and review methods for the ongoing creation and application of new resources?
The lessons learned in each of these areas will be documented below.
C. Organizational Context
MERLOT: The ELIXR project could not have been successful without the affiliated activities of our sponsoring organization, the MERLOT community. Currently, MERLOT supports an online repository of over 24,000 online learning materials which during the time period of the pilot study was experiencing a dramatic growth in usage: at the start of 2006, the number of unique users seeking out shared learning resources was up 50% over the previous year to over 40,000 unique users per month. Many of the collaborative relationships in ELIXR were based on the discipline communities and institutional partnership from MERLOT. Additionally, the MERLOT Faculty Development editorial board has provided 15 summative reviews on case stories. MERLOT has also been a vital partner for dissemination and promotion throughout the grant and will continue to play a key role in sustainability.
State Systems and Faculty Development Collaboratives: The MERLOT ELIXR project also relied heavily on resources, processes and partnerships within the California State University [CSU], including facilities in the Office of the Chancellor such as the Center for Distributed Learning, the Faculty Development Council, the Institute for Teaching and Learning, and Academic Technology Services.
One of the challenges that MERLOT ELIXR project experienced early on was the declining fiscal situation for many of the project’s partners, which meant that some of the state-wide collaborative and system offices were not able to participate to the extent originally planned. For instance, the Faculty Development Center for the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities System was dissolved due to budget restraints. Although our original partners embraced their role, some were not organizationally positioned to work with faculty development offices, which was central to producing the multi-media resources.
With the need to discover new partners, the MERLOT ELIXR team shifted strategies and released two Requests for Proposals (RFP). The RFP process gave potential grantees a clearer sense of expectations, and in return, the ELIXR team was able to reach out to a broader group ensuring that the case stories would be high quality and the process efficient. Two conclusions emerged from this process with regard to existing collaborations as potential partners:
· Existing regional collaborations of faculty development leaders provided a good base for collaborations on MERLOT ELIXR digital case stories. In addition the CSU’s Faculty Development Council, the Texas Faculty Development Network and the Council of Ontario (Canada) Educational Developers were able to quickly leverage existing relationships to initiate and manage collaborative projects. In each, several institutions cooperated to each create case stories on a subset of disciplines around a shared theme of importance to all. The themes were also of importance to other member institutions in the regional collaboration and were highlighted at the organizations’ regional conferences. Of course, the resulting case stories are also freely available to other faculty development centers and to individual faculty accessing them over the Internet.
· On the other hand, existing collaborations focused on a particular teaching strategy or learning activity were not as effective in initiating and managing collaborations to create digital case stories. While some such collaborations expressed considerable interest in developing MERLOT ELIXR case stories to disseminate the advances in teaching methods which they wanted to promote, they often lacked the organizational structure necessary to manage a collaborative process to design, develop, review, apply and evaluate digital case story resources. They also appeared to lack the institutional contacts required to record and produce case story elements.
Discipline Associations: Another founding partner, the Science Education Resource Center (SERC) at Carleton College and its Teach the Earth portal for Teaching in the Geosciences, has (as planned) played a very valuable role in the MERLOT ELIXR evaluation and dissemination efforts. Three MERLOT ELIXR videos have been integrated into existing SERC teaching pedagogy modules in the Starting Point collection in the geosciences discipline, and this formed the basis for SERC’s evaluation report, which examined the value and utility of this type of multimedia presence into already existing modules. SERC’s Just-in-Time Teaching page highlights a case story developed by San Francisco State University and provides comprehensive teaching resources on the topic contributed by other sources.
According to Google Analytics, SERC is ranked as #15 out of 204 referral sources from which individuals access the MERLOT ELIXR digital case stories, underscoring that it has been successful in increasing visibility for the project. SERC will also instrumental in disseminating ELIXR case stories to the new portal for faculty teaching in Economics. This type of collaborative association with a discipline-specific community that has already significantly invested in resources for particular teaching methods has been efficacious for the ELIXR project, and it is a partnership model worth replicating for future efforts.
Individual Faculty Development Centers: A distinct characteristic of MERLOT ELIXR project is that faculty members are defined as the learners. When faculty members adopt innovative teaching practices, this newly acquired information will be demonstrated by changes in teaching and learning. However, the ELIXR project did not have individual contact with these learners and relied on faculty development leaders at four institutions– three public institutions that offer a variety of baccalaureate and master’s degrees and one institution that focuses on graduate and professional degrees for the health field – to collect the appropriate data on faculty learning.
Emerging Partnerships for Ongoing Sustainability: Two new relationships, with the New Media Consortium and the Professional Organization Development Network (POD), have emerged during the grant to widen our web presence and support sustainability of the MERLOT ELIXR products. The New Media Consortium (NMC) is a fitting partner given its focus on new media and technology and that many of its members are higher education institutions. NMC has agreed to promote information to its members on how to create case stories, host a webinar on digital case stories and faculty development, and partner on ELIXR’s future grant proposals.
The POD Network has recently augmented its online Resources webspace using a wiki – WikiPODia – and the MERLOT ELIXR team was invited to contribute content on digital case stories for faculty development and our Project Director was invited to participate on the POD Electronic Communications and Resources Committee. To date, there are two general articles on WikiPODia’s site from the ELIXR project, Digital Case Stories for Faculty Development and Helping Your Faculty to Optimize the First Day of Class, and as part of our dissemination efforts links to the other case stories will be posted to appropriate teaching topics. For example, a link to the collection of Assessment Rubrics stories created by University of Colorado at Denver will be added to the WikiPODia Rubrics article.