 Enrich your teaching and your students' learning. Become a Merlot peer reviewer. What is Merlot? And how does it work? We'll find this out and more in today's presentation. This is not one of those trick questions. Merlot is an acronym for Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching. And yes, it is a pre-collection of open educational resources, OER, and an educational community organized into contributors, peer reviewers, and editorial boards. As well, Merlot is a curated set of learning materials that are triaged at peer reviewed for content quality, ease of use, and potential for learning. And that's where you come in. It's all of the above. Merlot peer reviewers evaluate materials and can award a maximum of five stars for meeting three major criteria. The first is quality of content. Here, we're talking about whether the material is up to date. Is it written by a reliable source? Is the material something that is useful and something that will enrich students' learning? Second, ease of use. How easy is it for your students to use this material? Do all the links work? Can a student get lost in it? Are there annoying ads that pop up during the use of the material? Does the material only work on a particular browser or operating system? All these things can contribute to whether a material is valuable in your course and in your teaching and your students' learning. This is especially important to me, and that is to think about what the potential effectiveness is of this material as a teaching tool. For example, can it be used to supplement your courses? Is it something you'd want to use in class? It is something that you could be used by a small group or for a project. Think about all the different ways that it could be used and include that in the review. Here's how the peer review process works. First, the material is triaged by a member of an editorial board. That means we look at it enough to know whether it is valuable enough for two reviewers to spend the time to look at the material carefully and to complete their reviews. Sometimes we triage a material highly because it is an outstanding contribution to the field. Sometimes a really great material might not get reviewed simply because it has a narrow focus and only a few people would be using it. After material is triaged with five stars, we put it on our list of reviews to complete. Two more low-peer reviewers review each material carefully using a form that they learned in Grape Camp. That's getting reviewers accustomed to the process of evaluation. When they complete their reviews, then an editor or editorial board member completes a composite review where we put all that information together. If there's a real discrepancy in the reviews, then we often assign a third person or that editor to complete a third review to ensure that users get the best information possible. Once the composite is complete, it is sent to the author for approval. If we don't hear back from an author within two weeks, we post the review. Only then is it available for our users to see, to read, and to help them make decisions about their use of the material. As you can see, we have many more low editorial disciplinary boards. Currently, the ones that have an asterisk, agriculture, and environmental sciences in English have no editorial board or editor. So if this is your area of expertise, we'd love to have you join us. And you too could be an editor or an editorial board member. After you complete Grape Camp, then you're able to join a more low-disciplinary board and you are able to review in that particular area that you've selected. So how does the peer review process work? Well, first you do an orientation through Grape Camp. Remember, that's getting reviewers accustomed to the process of evaluation. While we recognize that many of you have done reviews for journals or for courses, we really appreciate the fact that all of our reviewers have had the same orientation. And so we require that reviewers do Grape Camp. Grape Camp can be completed in several different ways. There are three one-hour sessions in three separate weeks, or you can do an asynchronous Grape Camp or a self-study. We have Grape Camp scheduled every month throughout the year. You can choose a time that works for you, or you can do it asynchronously or as a self-study. Once you've completed Grape Camp, then you're assigned reviews by your editor. The reviews are self-paced. You and your editor can decide when an assignment works for you. Sometimes reviewers will ask that they be given two, three, or even five reviews at the same time and be flexible about when they're completed. Other times reviewers do one review and ask for another when it's convenient for them. Doing the reviews is service to the profession, but it's also a great opportunity for professional development. You learn a lot about what's new in the field and you learn a lot about the ways in which professionals can present materials in ways that are useful for educators and students. At the end of the Merleau year, which runs from Innovate Conference to the next Innovate Conference, you'll receive a letter of appreciation from Merleau if you've completed at least two reviews. You may get an invitation to be a member of an editorial board if you're completing five reviews during the year, and if you complete 15 reviews and submit at least five new materials to Merleau, you can become a Merleau peer reviewer extraordinaire. In addition to a certificate, recognition at the conference award ceremony, and a letter of commendation that is sent to you and to your dean or supervisor, you get a free virtual registration at the Innovate Conference. So how does Merleau Reviewing help your teaching and your students' learning? Well, for one thing, it introduces you to materials that you may not have located on your own. While Merleau edits your strive to assign materials in your particular area of your discipline, sometimes the material is more generalized, and these are the ones that you might not have located yourself. I have often found materials that were assigned to me that I then decided to use in my classroom. Doing the review requires you to think about how you would use these materials. Would you use them in a presentation? Would you use them for small group work? Would they be assigned to students individually? Would they be appropriate for homework? Would it be something you could use in a flipped classroom? All these questions come up. The review asks you to think about the material both from your perspective as an educator and from students' point of view. That's so important because you have to recognize how a student might respond to the material. Would that student be engaged in the material? Would a student get lost in the material? And would the student find that that material helps them to understand the topic more? So what's next if you're really interested? And I sure hope that you are. Please contact me at jane.more at csulb.edu. That stands for California State University Long Beach. I'll send you all the information about Grape Camp and you can sign up and either do the next session or do it asynchronously. Once you've done that, you can choose your editorial board and start doing reviews. We'd love to have you as a member of the Merleau community. Thanks.