Merlot

MERLOT at http://www.merlot.org/ is a instructional technology review site. It might be a model for peer review of tools. It seems to run on a collaborative model where members review each other’s materials.

“Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching; individual authors cited for selected content
Short Description: This is an open, peer reviewed and rated repository of content supplied by a variety of authors. Some of the material may be reused, subject to copyright or other use arrangements with the author; minimally, the material can be used as a model for new development. The content has been catalogued according to subject matter. It ranges from reference material, to lectures, simulations and tests. Ratings from peer reviews are provided, where available, for ‘Quality of Content’, ‘Potential Effectiveness’ and ‘Ease of Use’. Content for each subject area may be sorted by ‘Title’, ‘Rating’, ‘Author’, ‘Date Entered’ or ‘Item Type’. User comments, where available, are divided into ‘General Remarks’ and ‘Technical Remarks’.

MERLOT also offers discipline-specific communities.” This is from the Short Description field of FOSS (Faculty Online Support Services) at foss.opasonline.org. FOSS would seem to be a Canadian project spun out of OPAS (Office for Partnerships for Advanced Skills). OPAS looks like an industry/university consortium around technology skills. FOSS is a portal for instructors.