Enhancing interactive teaching of engineering topics using digital materials of the MERLOT database

Abstract

Open Educational Resources are freely accessible, openly licensed text, media, and other digital assets that are useful for teaching, learning, and assessing as well as for research purposes. They include free use for educational purposes by teachers and learners, and encompass all types of digital media. They are frequently used as support of teaching and learning activities, using course content available in repositories under open licenses. Availability of well-structured and peer-reviewed online repositories covering a broad range of topics are highly appreciated. MERLOT (Multimedia Education Resource for Learning and Online Teaching) is an online repository where its partners and members are devoted to identifying, peer reviewing, organizing and making available existing online learning resources in a range of academic disciplines for its use by higher education faculty and students. This article concerns the usefulness of MERLOT in engineering education. At the Engineering collection of MERLOT, lots of resources can be found on a wide variety of topics ranging from aerospace engineering to petroleum engineering to help teachers with their teaching and research. The MERLOT Engineering Community and Materials are described, highlighting the availability of learning resources in nineteen engineering disciplines and twenty one types of material, including animations, online courses, simulations and reference materials. The Engineering Board is in charge of expanding and managing the collection, as well as curating the same applying the rigorous peer review processes of MERLOT to those online learning materials of valuable high quality.