Sent: Sat 12/3/2005 10:46 AM
The VCCS MERLOT team is playing a major role in directly helping students affected by Hurricane Katrina. The article below is from the December 2005, MERLOT Newsletter. The complete newsletter is attached.
Without a Home, How do we educate? MERLOT, Katrina and the Delgado Community College
Delgado Community College, an institution of the Louisiana Board of Regents with campuses in New Orleans and Covington, Louisiana, was one of the colleges that was impacted by Hurricane Katrina. The academic year had only just begun when the storm hit, closing the college and leaving faculty and students displaced and scrambling for shelter in other parts of the region. In an effort to salvage the instructional year for its academic community, Delgado administrators started looking for solutions. One such answer began with a phone call from Cindy Siegrist, Delgado CC Office from the Office of Faculty Development to Michael Waguespack, a former Delgado faculty member, now teaching at Northern Virginia Community College of the Virginia Community College System. Siegrist and Waguespack brainstormed about how Delgado could quickly bring more courses online to resume instruction for its students. The obvious need was to find quality online materials that had been classroom-tested and that were ready to go. Waguespack immediately thought of MERLOT as a solution for Delgado’s course content needs. He contacted NVCC colleague, Laura Franklin, Co-Editor of the World Languages collection of MERLOT, Laura in turn contacted MERLOT administration for help and received immediate support for collaboration with Delgado. A project was born.
The Editorial Boards of MERLOT in various disciplines have mobilized to create annotated Personal Collections within MERLOT, matching content to the syllabi of Delgado instructors. These personal collections contain materials that will help Delgado CC instructors move forward in their instruction without ‘reinventing the wheel.’ Two collections in English as a Second Language have been started and can be seen at:
and
MERLOT administration received requests from other Delgado faculty and other Editorial Boards have begun answering the call. The early success of this project can be attributed to the productive interaction of two MERLOT partners. Both the VCCS and the Louisiana Board of Regents share a longstanding commitment to the development of the MERLOT collection. The faculty members from these institutions have collaborated as Editors and Peer Reviewers for years. MERLOT has afforded these systems the opportunity to become a community in the most human sense of the word, which in turn makes collaboration that much more meaningful for all the partners of MERLOT.
It was also due to MERLOT’s maturity as a collection that it was possible to build such a solution in short order. The collections started in this Delgado project, due to their public availability, will be of equal value to users of MERLOT throughout the Gulf region and those in the rest of the world. Faculty members who create collections will enrich their own courses and make MERLOT a richer resource for everyone. Through this collaborative effort, MERLOT members and others have discovered a valuable resource in our Personal Collections which enable instructors to have immediate access to learning materials used by others. For more information contact webmaster@merlot.org.
Information about MERLOT course content that is available to all VCCS faculty to use in their courses is located at
http://itde.vccs.edu/MERLOT
http://itde.vccs.edu/MERLOT
The VCCS MERLOT Team
- Bruce Brown from NRCC serves on MERLOT's Business Editorial Board
- Deborah Clarkson from VHCC serves on MERLOT's Health Sciences Editorial Board
- Laura Franklin from NVCC serves as Co-Editor of MERLOT's World Languages Editorial Board
- Margarita Hodge from NVCC serves on MERLOT's World Languages Editorial Board
Corinne Hoisington from CVCC serves on MERLOT's Information Technology Editorial Board - Idana Hamilton from SwVCC serves on MERLOT's Teaching & Technology Editorial Board
- William Paquette from TCC serves as Co-Editor of MERLOT's History Editorial Board
- Rassa Rassai from NVCC serves on MERLOT's Engineering Editorial Board
- Reva Savkar from NVCC serves on MERLOT's Chemistry Editorial Board
- Patricia Taylor from TNCC serves on MERLOT's Mathematics Editorial Board
- Marty Zahn from TNCC serves on MERLOT's Biology Editorial Board
- Bob Vawter from the System Office is the MERLOT Project Director for the VCCS
The VCCS MERLOT Team is looking for additional VCCS faculty and librarians to be a part of MERLOT. Anyone interested should contact Bob Vawter.
Robert Vawter
Director, E-learning Delivery System Administrator
Virginia Community College System
804.819.4692 Fax: 804.819.4770
rvawter@vccs.edu
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