W E L C O M E !

Current Projects: Peer Review

Peer Review of Digital Learning Resources in Engineering Education

NEEDS, in collaboration with MERLOT's engineering discipline community, is instituting a peer review program for the resources of both digital libraries. The peer review process is built upon MERLOT's successful peer review process

A "peer review" is an evaluation of the QUALITY OF CONTENT, EASE OF USE, and POTENTIAL EFFECTIVENESS of a learning material by a prescribed set of criteria. The evaluation is communicated in a report that summarize the positive and negative features of the learning materials. In MERLOT, the evaluation also awards "stars" to provide a relative evaluation among the learning materials, with five stars being the highest rating. When a module is peer reviewed in MERLOT, the overall rating (1 to 5 stars) is displayed next to the module title. MERLOT users can click on the overall rating for more details about the evaluation. NEEDS is currently determining how to display and/or share these jointly conducted peer reviews.

If you have any questions about the peer review efforts, please contact Dr. Joseph G. Tront, NEEDS Premier Award Editor and MERLOT Engineering Co-Editor, at jgtront@vt.edu.