Press Release
July 26, 2005
MERLOT Partnership with O'Reilly Media
Nashville, TN-- The Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online
Teaching (MERLOT) , an open resource designed to aggregate, evaluate, and
make available quality online instructional resources, and SafariU,
O'Reilly Media's new Web-based platform for creating and sharing custom
course materials online and in print, announced a new partnership today at
the 2005 MERLOT International Conference taking place in Nashville.
SafariU gives Computer Science and Information Technology educators access
to the most current and comprehensive repository of computer technology
content available, and allows them to create print textbooks and online
syllabi tailored precisely to their teaching needs. SafariU users are
free to search and select the content they want--and only what they want,
even if it's just one section of one chapter--from the wealth of resources
in Safari Books Online, a joint venture of O'Reilly and the Pearson
Technology Group. Safari includes thousands of titles from O'Reilly,
Addison-Wesley, Prentice-Hall, and other respected technology publishers
as well as O'Reilly's 5000-strong periodical database.
Through this new partnership, MERLOT and O'Reilly users will have a
greater quantity of high quality online resources that can be easily
incorporated into faculty-designed courses. "O'Reilly recognizes that the
MERLOT community offers a well-spring of quality education through its
efforts in creating, organizing, and evaluating teaching and learning
resources. We greatly appreciate O'Reilly's funding fellowships for
faculty participation on MERLOT's Information Technology Editorial Board
to grow this watershed for IT education and workforce development," says
Gerry Hanley, Executive Director of MERLOT. The partnership will enable
qualified MERLOT members to have access to SafariU's rich library of
technology content, and they'll be able to deliver course materials that
include that content in print, online, or in both formats. SafariU users
will be also be invited to join the MERLOT community.
O'Reilly and MERLOT will collaboratively develop and deploy technology
tools and services that will integrate access to MERLOT and O'Reilly
resources so our students, faculty, staff, and life-long learners in the
IT community will have easy access to high quality and relevant digital
content. In addition to SafariU's tools for creating course materials,
O'Reilly's platform features the web-based Learning Object Exchange, where
instructors post course material, trade teaching strategies, and share
book and syllabi projects. The partnership will dramatically increase the
pool of participants in the Learning Object Exchange by opening it up to
MERLOT's users. SafariU will also adopt MERLOT's time-tested evaluation
system for Learning Object Exchange materials, in which both peers and
qualified faculty panels evaluate community members' contributions.
"This collaboration with MERLOT is exciting," says CJ Rayhill, CIO and
General Manager of O'Reilly's Education Division. "The Learning Object
Exchange was really the starting point for SafariU. To facilitate
conversation and information exchange--that's what made us want to
develop a web-aided instructional tool in the first place. MERLOT is a great example of how a working exchange can inform and enhance online education."
About Safari Books Online
Safari Books Online is a joint venture between the industry's leading
technical publishers, O'Reilly Media, Inc., and The Pearson Technology
Group. Safari's flagship service, Safari Tech Books Online, is the premier
electronic reference library for programming and IT departments. Unlike an
online bookstore, Safari is a fully searchable database of the electronic
versions of books from O'Reilly Media, Inc. and Pearson's many imprints:
Addison-Wesley Professional, Adobe Press, Cisco Press, Macromedia Press,
New Riders, Peachpit Press, Prentice Hall PTR, Sun Microsystems Press,
Que, and Sams. A growing number of titles from other publishers such as
Microsoft Press and Thomson South-Western are also available. Safari's
portfolio includes four additional electronic reference libraries: Safari
Bookshelf for the individual technologist, Safari HelpDesk Online for
enterprise knowledge workers, Safari Business Books Online for business
professionals and Safari Enterprise Library.
For more information about
Safari Books Online
About MERLOT
The Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching is an
international cooperative formed for the purpose of aggregating and making
freely accessible high quality online resources to improve learning and
teaching within higher education. The cooperative connects systems,
consortiums, and institutions of higher education, professional
organizations of academic disciplines, corporations, and individual
members to form a community of people who strive to enrich the teaching
and learning experience.
For more information about MERLOT
About O'Reilly
O'Reilly Media spreads the knowledge of innovators through its books, online services, magazines, and conferences. Since 1978, O'Reilly Media has been a chronicler and catalyst of cutting-edge development, homing in on the technology trends that really matter and spurring their adoption by amplifying "faint signals" from the alpha geeks who are creating the future. An active participant in the technology community, the company has a long history of advocacy, meme-making, and evangelism.
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