About Us
The California State University (CSU) recognizes that quality education and the professional development of its faculty must be immersed within the discipline and institutional culture and be governed by the faculty themselves. With these principles as a foundation, the CSU is collaboratively developing online resources and web-based services to enable faculty and students to be successful in their teaching and learning. MERLOT (www.merlot.org) was created in 1997 by the CSU to help faculty and students share high quality online content and pedagogy. Under the CSU's leadership, MERLOT has grown to an international consortium of education institutions, professional societies, digital libraries, and corporations (see taste.merlot.org for more information).
Building Locally, Linking Globally
The CSU is building on the efforts of local campus leadership within the disciplines relevant to educational leadership to develop communities of faculty, students, and partners who will identify, review, organize and disseminate exemplary resources for teaching, learning and research in this field.. For example, several CSU campuses have received federal grants to engage in leading research on issues related to improving achievement and academic success among diverse groups of P-12 and community college students The challenges CSU faculty and students face include:
- How do I plan teaching and research that build on and reflect the most significant elements of current knowledge concerning educational reforms and achievement in P-12 and community college education?
- How do I select areas of focus for research that address significant problems in P-12 and community college education, in ways that advance effective educational reforms and result in improved student performance?
The Educational Leadership Commons - is a locally governed website that leverages the larger MERLOT communities. CSU faculty and students create and work within their local online community, resources, and collection but their work gets channeled as they see fit, into the larger systemwide educational leadership community and the even larger multidisciplinary MERLOT Community. The opportunity to participate in the communities that best serve their individual needs is what the current design will enable faculty and students to do.