How to Create a MERLOT Identity and set of Personal Collections for your Department Faculty

The advantages of departmental collections:

• collections allow department faculty to easily locate high-quality resources that are relevant to the courses that they are teaching
• collections encourage departmental use of high-quality, web-based interactive resources
• department faculty can add relevant MERLOT resources and annotations concerning their use to the collections; these resources and annotations are then available to all department faculty, thus forming a sense of shared purpose and collaboration
• collections provide adjunct faculty, in particular, with a department-generated set of relevant resources

To create a MERLOT identity for your department:

1. Choose a contact person for the department. 
2. Determine a username and password for your department—ones that are simple and easy to remember.

   Example:  The Mechanical Engineering department at the University of Memphis might choose the username umemphismech.

3. Have the contact person join MERLOT by visiting www.merlot.org , clicking on the link for Membership, and using the department username (viz., first name: umemphis, last name: mech) and his or her email address for membership.
4. After receiving a MERLOT password via email, the contact person needs to login to MERLOT using his or her email address as the username along with the MERLOT password.
5. After logging in, click on the link “Hello, username” (e.g., “Hello, umemphis mech”) at the top of the MERLOT homepage.
6. Click on the link labeled Edit Profile on the succeeding page.
7. Complete the user profile for the department and change the login name from the contact person’s email address to the chosen department username, e.g., umemphismech.  Also, enter the department password as the new password and submit the edited profile.  This completes the creation of the MERLOT identity for your department.

To create a set of Personal Collections of resources for your department:

1. Login to MERLOT with the department username and department password.
2. Click on the link entitled “Hello, username”
3. Click on the tab labeled Personal Collections.
4. Click on the button labeled Create a New Personal Collection.
5. Enter a name for the Personal Collection and a brief description of the collection
6. Click on the button labeled Save and Add Materials.
7. Once the collection is created, you may then add resources to it by browsing the MERLOT collection, finding appropriate resources, and clicking on the links for Add to a Personal Collection or you may use the MERLOT search engine to locate specific resources and then add them to the collection.
8. Continue with this process and create collections for all desired categories of materials.  For example, in mechanical engineering you might create collections for Statics, Dynamics, Thermodynamics, Fluid Mechanics, Mechanics of Materials, Machine Design, etc.   The categories can correspond to the courses or topic areas that are most commonly taught by your department faculty.  By doing so, you provide all department faculty, both full-time and adjunct, with a customized set of high-quality, web-based active learning resources that relate specifically to courses that are offered by your department.
9. Faculty may then edit these department collections and annotate selected resources as desired.  Some examples for annotations are:
   • describe how they use a resource in their teaching (classroom demo, lab assignment, homework, etc.)
   • describe when and where in the curriculum that they use this resource
   • describe how this resource is pedagogically effective
   • describe how their students have responded to the use of the resource