I went to this session with less interest in MERLOT than in seeing other models of faculty and course development. I found Lisa Pirinelli-Dubuc’s part of the presentation rather interesting in that way, seeing that the SUNY Learning Network that she was representing has 4300+ online courses– almost all of which are wholly online– with 100,000 students and 2000 faculty!

Among other things she pointed out the SUNY TLT cooperative which provides online faculty development courses in a 4-course sequence, various 1hr webinars and an annual workshop at their Conference for Instructional Technologies (for example, the 2007 CIT conference). Also mentioned: the Course Redesign Initiative and their Faculty Development Program.

Information to be found in the MERLOT Pedagogy Portal could be quite useful in our own faculty development efforts.

Although we are not particularly into MERLOT, the SUNY TLT also shares planning and production materials to help others who want to put on Faculty Development workshops, and I suspect there will be much there that is broadly accessible.

Phil Moss stepped in for a presenter who could not make it and shared another interesting MERLOT subject area, the Developing and Delivering Online Courses Portal, sponsored by McGraw-Hill.