header image

Open Educational Practices: Sharing Through ePortfolios

To advance open educational practices (OEP), MERLOT and SkillsCommons have designed this OEP portal to enable easy discovery and sharing of free, open, and exemplary collections of ePortfolios along with tools, templates, and guidelines that showcase open practices in higher education.

image of finger touching a tablet device
Moving Online

The COVID-19 pandemic required higher education to quickly transform their instruction to online modalities. MERLOT and SkillsCommons created OER portals to support the migration and these OER portal websites can be reused, revised, remixed, redistributed, and retained by institutions quickly and easily. Explore the open practice of adopting OER portals that can accelerate the migration of instruction from face-to-face to online formats.

Learn More

image of app icons flying out of laptop computer
Course Redesign with Technology

Over 700 faculty have authored open teaching ePortfolios on how they redesigned their courses with technology to improve student success. They captured their rational, the implementation, and their outcomes assessment in OER ePortfolios. Explore open practices for defining learning outcomes and redesigning teaching & learning activities.

 

Learn More

photo of an apple framed in a tablet device
Affordable Learning

Over 100 faculty have authored open ePortfolios about how and why they've adopted and taught with free and open etextbooks and resources to improve student success. The OER ePortfolios include course syllabi and cover a wide range of general education courses common in higher education. Explore open practices for adopting and teaching with OER.

 

Learn More

 

tablet device in use in a factory setting.
Career & Technical Education

Explore this collection of over 50 open institutional, teaching, video, and podcast ePortfolios that tell stories about how and why community and technical colleges' created more innovative and successful learning and employability solutions for diverse populations of students. These open practices were funded by the U.S. Department of Labor's $1.9 billion TAACCCT program.

 

 

Learn More

student using virtual reality equipment
Virtual Labs

Virtual Labs are various types of simulations that can substitute for "learning by doing" face-to-face/in-class activities, seen frequently in STEM laboratory courses. Faculty redesigned their lab courses with virtual labs and authored open teaching ePortfolios to describe their plans, implementation, and assessment of the student learning outcomes when teaching with virtual labs. Explore open practices for virtual labs in higher education.

 

Learn More

person using laptop computer
Quality Assurance

MERLOT and SkillsCommons offers an open quality assurance program for online and blended education that has been adopted by higher ed institutions. Campus staff authored open institutional ePortfolios describing their plans, implementation, and outcomes of their quality assurance programs. Explore our open instruments, open professional development resources, and open examplars of quality on online instruction can be models for adopting effective practices for designing, implementing and evaluating quality online instruction.

Learn More

 

decorative image representing online education tools such as tablet devices.
Sharing Open Educational Practices with ePortfolios and More!

Open educational practices need to be easily captured and retained with free and open tools that enable others to reuse, revise, remix, retain, and redistribute.

  • MERLOT's Content Builder tool is a free and open authoring tool for faculty, students, and staff to create open teaching, learning, and institutional ePortfolios and MERLOT hosts the ePortfolios for free in the open MERLOT library. Anyone with an email address and internet access can become a MERLOT member (it's free) and use the MERLOT Content Builder as well as many other of MERLOT's Open Educational Services to share open educational practices.
  • SkillsCommons provides open storytelling guidelines and a rubric for evaluating the quality and power of stories to capture the open educational practices that produced personal and institutional outcomes.

Learn More