Adobe Success Story

For college instructors, Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT) is an invaluable repository of reusable digital content and pedagogical services. Founded in 1997 as a project of the California State University (CSU) System's Center for Distributed Learning, MERLOT has grown into an international consortium of higher education institutions that are working together to plan, set practices, and share resources for online teaching and learning initiatives.

Now managed through the CSU Office of the Chancellor, MERLOT uses a variety of Adobe software products to further its mission related to online teaching and learning. Staff and content contributors use Adobe Dreamweaver and Adobe Contribute software to build and manage web portals—categorized by discipline and program areas—that house a broad spectrum of teaching and learning assets and resources.

"Adobe RoboHelp was also an essential tool for building all the Help screens for our new release of www.merlot.org," says MERLOT webmaster Barbra Bied Sperling. "It has proven to be an invaluable resource for documenting end-user functionality of the website." MERLOT also uses Adobe Contribute and Dreamweaver to develop and maintain the "About Us" informational section of the MERLOT website. In addition, MERLOT uses Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional to deliver webinars and to facilitate web-based training for new reviews that become part of the MERLOT collection.

MERLOT staff uses Adobe Captivate software to create tutorials to help editorial boards learn how to conduct peer reviews of online instructional materials. "Adobe technology enables us to use our portals effectively to communicate with our peers, toss ideas back and forth, and create one-stop shopping for our business partners, educators, and students," says Dr. Cathy Swift, director of academic partner services at MERLOT.

Membership in MERLOT is free to individual educators and learners. Worldwide, more than 23,000 faculty members and 11,000 students are registered members of MERLOT along with over 10,000 staff, administrators, librarians, and other educational professionals. In one nine-month period, the site had almost 300,000 unique visitors—with an average of 1,500 unique and 500 repeat visitors every day.

Members can browse and search the online collections of learning resources, add materials, create personal collections (similar to portfolios), and offer comments and assignments to the MERLOT collection. The consortium has one editorial review board for each of the more than 15 academic, workforce, and institutional disciplines it covers. Each of these disciplines has a web portal to focus users on specific material concerning online instructional information related to their discipline.

Future plans include using Dreamweaver and Contribute to redevelop the MERLOT Partner Reserve, a content management service containing documents and resources about faculty development that are available only to MERLOT Partners. "These Adobe products are essential to make it easy for us to develop and manage a new version of the Reserve to give our Partners access to invaluable resources that make being a MERLOT Partner worthwhile," says Sperling.

Benefits

• Created cost-effective portals and online publications for rapidly growing membership
• Achieved operational efficiencies for IT support services
• Maintained site stability and design standards
• Strengthened online communities
• Provided web-based training and collaboration
• Helped ensure timely editing and publishing of discipline-specific news and information

Project Details

Non-technical web participation
Enjoying a rapid rate of growth, MERLOT faces the challenge of stabilizing its expanding digital library while controlling costs, building community, and trying to keep content up-to-date. Managing increased traffic, upgrading existing technology, and adding new features to the site required an IT staff equivalent to three full-time and several part-time people. At that staffing level, there was little time to keep news and content up-to-date, and adding additional IT staff was not an option.

The MERLOT team looked to Adobe Contribute software to enable non-technical and technical academic experts to post news and information to the web without requiring IT support. "Anyone who can handle Word documents can use Contribute," says Swift. "Programming skills are not necessary." Contribute users can quickly link any document to a website, or copy and paste from Word documents while keeping text formatting and HTML code standards intact. Sperling created templates in Dreamweaver with predetermined layers of permissions to prevent accidental overwrites by portal editors.

Staff at MERLOT also use Adobe Contribute software to keep content fresh on the annual MERLOT International Conference website; the website of the online peer-reviewed Journal of Online Learning and Teaching (JOLT); and the tri-annual newsletter The Grapevine, which is distributed to about 50,000 subscribers. According to Swift, the organization's content management process is quite straightforward, extremely cost-effective, and does not require IT support. Contribute software provides valuable administrative control over who can edit and who can publish.

"I love Adobe Contribute," says Sperling, who maintains the portals and uses Adobe Dreamweaver to create templates for the online newsletter and information sections of the website. Sperling lauds Dreamweaver for its ease of use and its rapid code-editing capability. "The tight integration between Adobe Dreamweaver and Contribute software allows us to maximize workflows among technical and non-technical teams."

Templates created in Dreamweaver determine the overall look and feel of the MERLOT portals. "We wanted to maintain our organizational orientation and make sure that the portal design reinforces our mission and our goals," says Dr. Sorel Reisman, managing director at MERLOT.

Real-time collaboration worldwide
Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional software is the tie that binds MERLOT members around the world through webinars and extensive use of archived Adobe Flash video content. For example, staff videotapes headline speakers at the annual MERLOT International Conference and archives the video files for website visitors to replay at their convenience. Previously, editors, project directors, and institutional partners met face-to-face twice a year, but the time and travel costs associated with that were a challenge.

"We use Acrobat Connect Professional for several different virtual all-day conferences so people from all over the world can attend from the comfort of their own office," says Reisman. "A web event held with Acrobat Connect Professional is a much more cost-effective solution than an on-site meeting and accomplishes most of the same objectives." All video content is archived for retrieval using Acrobat Connect Professional.

MERLOT staff also uses Adobe Captivate software to enable remote training of educators on how to participate in the peer review of submissions of online learning materials—a complex workflow that enables editors to manage a series of content reviews. According to Reisman, "The peer-review process is important because it distinguishes the quality of the MERLOT repository from other digital libraries."

Adobe Captivate software makes it easy for MERLOT staff to deploy tutorials relatively quickly without investing heavily in IT or travel resources. At the same time, end users can easily access specific content areas of a training module at will, without having to review an entire tutorial from the beginning and without having to download additional software or plug-ins.

By leveraging Adobe technology to run many aspects of its operation, MERLOT has created a highly successful model that is the envy of other educational organizations. By request, MERLOT packages its Dreamweaver portal code along with installation instructions and makes it available (by conditional agreement) to other virtual entities, which in turn host similar sites built in Adobe Dreamweaver and manage them using Adobe Contribute software. "Imitation is the highest form of flattery," says Reisman.

---

Do you have a story you would like to share? Join the Adobe Customer Reference Program.