The typical campus culture of teaching insulate faculty from learning exemplary teaching practices from model colleagues in their institution and/or discipline.   Furthermore, the exemplary teaching practices are multidimensional and complex to capture for sharing; they must take into consideration the diversity of students’ readiness for learning, the differences in the knowledge and skills that defines the discipline, and the differences in the institutional priorities that distinguishes campuses from each other.   All these challenges reduce the likelihood of scaling, sustaining, and replicating effective and efficient faculty development for student success. 

The demand for effective and efficient faculty development has grown to critical proportions 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 their scholarly preparation in graduate school or professional organizations have not or do not support.  The demographics of faculty indicate a significant increase in retirements and hires which will enable institutions to transform the teaching-learning culture on their campuses through faculty development interventions.

The CSU and MERLOT has recognized that we need to develop new ways for faculty development centers from a wide range of higher education institutions and online discipline repositories (e.g. MERLOT) to provide the discipline-based examples and the shared resources for faculty to re-use and adapt to implement exemplary teaching practices. The discipline-based examples can be video narratives of faculty and students demonstrating and reflecting on their teaching and learning, capturing the rich, multidimensional nature of education.  Integrating MRT’s into existing consortium projects will enable sustainability. Some examples of MRT’s being implemented by the CSU and MERLOT are:

1. •Light Bridge (http://lightbridge.sonoma.edu/main/index.html) focuses on preparing future K-12 teachers by providing a collection of video rich content explaining and showcasing teaching practices in K-12
   

2. •Voila (Video Oriented Instructional Lesson Authoring System at http://www.cdl.edu/cdl_projects/voila_home) is a web-based authoring application which allows users to create video-oriented presentations using text, images, video, audio, commentary, and supplemental materials, typically focused on K-12 instruction.
   

3. •MERLOT ELIXR (http://www.seedwike.com/wiki/fipse_elixr/) is capturing exemplary teaching practices in higher education within video-rich online resources
   

4. •MERLOT Faculty Development Community (http://facultydevleopment.merlot.org) provides a diverse collection of over 1,000 online resources to support a variety of faculty development needs.
   

5. •MERLOT Discipline-Specific Learning Objects (http://www.merlot.org) is a ten year old community of instructors, students, librarians and others with an interest in multimedia teaching/learning, who use, develop, research, and participate in a social network of peers with similar interests.   The heart of MERLOT is a repository of more than 18,000 online learning materials that can be integrated into online instruction to provide learners with a rich multimedia learning experience.   The strength of the community of more than 56,000 registered participants, growing at a rate of more than 1,200 new members monthly, and the popularity of the website with over 1,000,000 hits in 2007,  are testimony to the value that the education community places on their ability to find and incorporate multimedia learning objects into their instructional design activities. 
   

Integral to the success of MERLOT are the efforts of those members to provide many different kinds of authentication of the value and utility of the items in the collection.  This is accomplished through various levels of peer review, through their addition of comments, ratings, and even their development of ancillary materials that direct others in best practice use of collection items.  The success of MERLOT reflects, not so much the operation of the organization and the collection, but a validation of the utility of the multimedia learning objects by those very instructors who deploy the kinds of instructional strategies that can be captured in video case stories.  MERLOT learning objects are the multimedia building blocks of those teachers’ multimedia instructional programs.  The MERLOT collection is real evidence of the practicality, utility, and even scalability of shareable multimedia learning materials.

MERLOT, 3-D Virtual Worlds and Second Life: Today we are beginning to explore even newer multimedia learning experiences in virtual worlds such as Second Life. MERLOT, in partnership with the University of Oregon’s Center for the Advancement of Technology in Education (CATE), and Sun Microsystems are developing a new infrastructure that will make available to instructors working in 3-D worlds, practices and building blocks for multimedia 3-D instruction, analogous to those that have been developed in our 50 year old 2-D multimedia world.  While this pursuit is just getting off the ground, the partners in this project are very excited about the still unimagined potential of this and other similar projects.  As multimedia becomes more and more “real,” it may one day be difficult to discern any real differences between the face-to-face relationships and world we live in, and the ones we create.  Or perhaps in those created face-to-face worlds we will be able to deliver even more effective and cost-effective instruction than we can imagine in our real world.

Strategy Considerations:

To successfully implement and sustain a program for capturing and collecting video case stories, a number of processes should be in place.

1. •Governance process for project decisions and managing partner participation in the project.
   

2. •Guidelines for developing case story resources.
   

3. •Strategies for implementing case story resources by faculty development centers (Training and Dissemination plan)
   

4. •Technology plan
   

5. •Copyright
   

6. •Formative and summative evaluation program
   

Guidelines for case story resources:  The three main features of the case story resources are:

1. •a case study describing how and why to use an online resource in teaching the disciplinary topic,
   

2. •a first person video narrative capturing the reflections of the faculty learning to use an exemplary teaching practices and at least 4 student reflections on the experience of learning from the faculty,
   

3. •the configuration of the online materials and all the associated peer reviews, comments, and learning assignments that are used in teaching the topic.
   

The guidelines for the case study will be those already in use by MERLOT and are an adaption of Carnegie Foundations KEEP toolkit.  The elements of the current case study include rationale, tips for teaching, impact on student learning, reflections on personal value.    Guidelines for the video narrative will include: a) interview prompts, b) video shooting, directing, and editing guidelines for producing consistent and high quality videos of faculty and student narratives, c) guidelines for selecting students and faculty for the videos.  The third component of the case story resource – configuring the exemplary curriculum for re-use – is guided by the people, organizations and institutions who will re-use the video case stories in their professional development programs.  The “Products” section of the MERLOT ELIXR website ((http://www.seedwike.com/wiki/fipse_elixr/)   provides our current set of tools and guidelines.

Copyright and Openness:  Creative Commons

MERLOT has recently established its advocacy for the Creative Commons strategy for sharing its content - http://taste.merlot.org/acceptableuserpolicy.html  .  The issues of copyright and (re)use of other peoples creative works is a critical issue to address with MRTs.