CREATING A DEPARTMENTAL REPOSITORIES

How to Create a Department Collection
A Department Collection of MERLOT resources is a set of Personal Collections that has been created specifically for your department by one or more of your department faculty. This set of resources may be accessed by all department faculty and each faculty member may annotate and/or add resources to the collection through a single membership login via a department’s MERLOT identity.
The advantages of a departmental collection:
• allows department faculty to easily locate high-quality resources that are relevant to the courses that they are teaching
• encourages departmental use of high-quality, interactive resources
• department faculty can add relevant MERLOT resources and annotations concerning their use to the collection; these resources and annotations are then available to all department faculty, thus forming a sense of shared purpose and collaboration
• provides adjunct faculty, in particular, with a department-generated set of relevant resources and a potential sense of ownership in the collection
This is a two-step process:
1. Create a MERLOT identity for your department
2. Create a set of Personal Collections for your department
Note: It may be helpful to print these instructions for reference while creating the collections.
1. How t o create a MERLOT identity for your department:
1. Choose a contact person for the department.
2. Determine an identity and password for your department—ones that are simple and easy to remember.
Example: The St. Petersburg College Math department chose the first name spc, the last name math, the username spcmath and an easy-to-remember password.
3. Have the contact person join MERLOT by visiting www.merlot.org , clicking on the link for Become a Member today!, and using the department identity (e.g., first name: spc, last name: math) and his or her email address for membership in step 1. In step 2, create the desired username and password (e.g., username spcmath, password xxxx)
2. How t o create a set of Personal Collections for your department
1. Login to MERLOT with your department username and password.
2. On the MERLOT homepage, click on the link entitled Create a personal collection.
3. Enter a Title for the Personal Collection and a brief Description of the collection.
4. Enter additional information if desired (optional).
5. Click on the button labeled Submit.
6. Now that the collection has been created, browse or search the MERLOT collection and locate a desired resource.
7. Click on the Title link of the resource.
8. In the section entitled Add to a personal collection, select your desired personal collection from the dropdown list.
9. Click on Add.
10. Continue with this process and create collections for all desired categories of materials. For example, you might create collections for Developmental Math, Precalculus, Calculus, Liberal Arts Math, Probability and Statistics, etc.
11. You may then edit these collections and annotate selected resources as desired. Some examples for annotations are:
1. describe how you use a resource in your teaching (classroom demo, lab assignment, homework, etc.)
2. describe when and where in the curriculum that you use this resource
3. describe how this resource is pedagogically effective
4. describe how your students have responded to the use of the resource