Keeping faculty online: the case of Merlot.(MERLOT)

Abstract

MERLOT is an online community of faculty with technology-enriched teaching as a shared goal. A survey of MERLOT Editorial Board members reveals key attributes of the academic community including on-going and sustained interactions, shared purpose or goals, reciprocity of information, support, and services, and conventions for establishing strong ties among participants. Patterns in the survey responses highlight camaraderie, leadership, and online community design as factors that support improved teaching. Benefits outweigh faculty time costs in accordance with sociological theory of distributed leadership.

Introduction

The Internet provides electronic support for virtual communities where people find others who share their interests. One study of online communities found 90 million Americans using the Internet to contact a group and referred to network users who nurture long-distance online community memberships as Cyber Groupies (Hoorigan et al, 2001). The subject of this paper is a survey of one particular higher education community of practice that has been functioning online for five years. Though it seems natural that academic communities would move some of their work to the virtual realm of online communities, not much is known about community attributes that can actually sustain the productivity of one type of online community in higher education: a faculty community of practice to improve effectiveness of teaching and learning. Indeed, many apparently consensus ideas about successful online communities remain to be tested for this particular group for whom information satisfaction and rigor are of particular concern.

Sociological theories suggest that building community requires on-going and sustained interactions, shared purpose or goals, shared resources with policies to control access, reciprocity of information and services, and protocols or conventions for establishing strong ties among participants (Kollock, 1998; Whittaker et al, 1997). Leimeister & Sidiris (2004) suggest that online communities are built on common interests or common tasks performed with both implicit and explicit codes of behavior. But very little published research explores the application of these theories to academic online communities in higher education. In fact, some proposed core attributes of online communities, such as the need for rules to govern the use of shared resources, seem largely hypothetical. Clearly, work in a virtual community of practice reduces threat of theft, but an idea that remains to be tested is the suggestion by Kollock (1998) and others that low risk makes a community dull and lacking in opportunity to build trust.

This study attempts to identify those elements that assist in building and sustaining an academic online community about teaching and learning. The context for the study is a nationwide community of Cyber Groupies who work together as Editorial Board members of the Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT), a project that started in 1999. MERLOT is a free and open collection of online learning materials designed primarily for faculty and students of higher education. MERLOT is also a grassroots community of faculty who make the resource collection grow by contributing materials and adding assignments and comments. Results of this study question the need to control access to academic resources shared online. Results also suggest that for the MERLOT editors, benefits of membership in the online community outweigh faculty time costs in accordance with sociological theory of distributed leadership and in spite of little professional status or recognition. The lynchpin that sustains the MERLOT online community is the camaraderie members view as important support for their productivity. Results illuminate the openness of the MERLOT online community to welcoming new members. But relationships between size and productivity of an online community merit further investigation, since the MERLOT community depends upon personal contact for interactions among working members.

Overview of the MERLOT Project