Online Learning Community Exploration

I explored several. The ones that I liked the most were MERLOT and SLOAN-C. I have evaluated MERLOT - which was my number 1 favorite.

Online Learning Community
MERLOT

• What is the goal or purpose of the community?
  
  “Putting educational interventions into practice.”

• What types of interactions are available to the community?
  
  Majority are asynchronous, members can add suggestions/comments to wiki’s or blogs.

• Do the interactions support the goals/purpose?
  
  Yes – since the point is to provide examples of educational tools that are discipline specific that should be put into practice – synchronous activities are not needed.

• What is the best quality of the community in terms of interaction?
  
  It is discipline specific – many of the others focused on teaching in no specific area.

• If you were a member, what changes would you like to see made in the community interactions to make it more suitable for you as a learner?
  
  I think it works fine the way it is. It might be nice to be able to schedule a chat about a specific topic if you had questions – or engage in a chat with those who have posted the educational interventions. One way to do that would be to have the intervention developers post times they would be available for chats.