FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Collaboration empowers international educators to sustain their innovation in education
[AUSTIN – June 15, 2021] — The Texas International Education Consortium (TIEC) and the Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT) announced today a new partnership to further collaborations between the two organizations on international online learning projects with a signed Memorandum of Understanding (MOU). This partnership cultivates a network of faculty and administrators around the world to promote TIEC’s international development and capacity-building programs using MERLOT’s extensive library of free, high-quality online resources as a vehicle to improve learning and teaching within higher education.
Both organizations are committed to providing professional development resources and opportunities to educators. TIEC, whose international programs include several designed to help educators develop their instructional skills, has partnered with MERLOT to expand access to resources for their program participants. These digital assets cover a wide range of topics, from free online instructional resources across all disciplines in both higher education and K-12 to free online resources about different pedagogies, open educational practices, ICT Literacy, virtual labs, and intensive English instruction. MERLOT creates customized portals for its partners, bringing curated educational resources together and making teaching innovations more conveniently available to communities around the world.
“In support of TIEC’s mission and vision of expanding access to quality education around the world and empowering strong partnerships with Texas, TIEC intends to use MERLOT’s Community Portal to curate resources to benefit our community of educators,” said Heather Farmakis, Ph.D., chief learning officer at TIEC.
“Empowering educators and learners around the world with free, high-quality online instructional resources is the shared mission and passion of MERLOT and TIEC,” said Gerry Hanley, executive director of MERLOT-SkillsCommons. “MERLOT’s open educational services integrated with TIEC’s programs build the capacities of the global teaching community to design their own educational solutions.”
TIEC represents 29 Texas universities and facilitates international education programs and partnerships on behalf of its members. MERLOT 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. Led by the California State University Long Beach, the cooperative connects systems, consortiums, institutions of higher education, professional organizations of academic disciplines, and individual members to form a community of people who strive to enrich the teaching and learning experience.
To learn more about TIEC’s curriculum services and online learning support programs and team, please visit www.tiec.org/curriculum-services.
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About the Texas International Education Consortium (TIEC):
The Texas International Education Consortium is a 37-member university consortium, representing world-class programs from all six systems of higher education and private institutions in the state of Texas, collectively serving over 700,000 students. TIEC facilitates and fosters international education programs and partnerships by, with, and for its university members. This model of cooperation provides access to over 50,000 faculty, broad research, and a wide array of cutting-edge educational resources and methods. Since its founding in 1985, TIEC has provided educational assistance and consulting services for governments and institutions in over 40 countries, across five continents. TIEC is a recognized expert with extensive experience working with governments and institutions of education to improve course and degree program quality and responsiveness and to foster equity and inclusion.
About Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT):
MERLOT (www.merlot.org) is a free and open online library that provides easy and worldwide access to over 90,000 free open educational resources for teachers and learners. Through its own curated collection and “smart search” of over 75 other free and open libraries of instructional content, MERLOT is a one-stop-shop for finding free and open educational resources. MERLOT’s collection continuously grows through the efforts of its over 180,000 members worldwide. California State University, Long Beach, one of the largest public universities in the state of California by enrollment, is home to MERLOT and its sister open online library in workforce development, SkillsCommons. SkillsCommons (www.skillscommons.org) is the world’s largest open educational resources library for workforce development and industry training materials.
MEDIA CONTACTS:
Anna Charnitski, Texas International Education Consortium
anna@tiec.org, (512) 600-6066
Gerry Hanley, MERLOT- SkillsCommos
gerry.hanley@csulb.edu, 562-335-3347