CEP811 MERLOT material review

MERLOT.org is a great site for Multimedia Educational Resources for Learning and Online Teaching. As part of CEP811 we're "peer reviewing" material following the Merlot evaluation standards. The three general categories of evalutation standards used within MERLOT are:

1) Quality of Content

2) Potential Effectiveness as a Teaching-Learning Tool

3) Ease of Use

In my case I've focused on the PE material available. Unfortunately there's not a lot of PE resources listed on MERLOT yet.

The first one I tried, "Kinesiology & Health: Non Traditional Sports" didn't exist anymore. When trying to recover the material, the link brings you to the University of Central Oklahoma where nothing can be found regarding the Non Traditional Sports simulation that's referred to on MERLOT. I've reported it as a "broken link" on the site.

Next was "Physical Activity: Introduction / DNPAO / CDC" a reference material.
As reference material it would be interesting as background for getting Americans physically active on a daily basis. At schools that would be through PE, recess and After School Activities. The Quality of Content is good with 7 clear strategies mapped out for the implementation in Education (Teacher-Learning Tool).  Ease of Use is good. A lot of content that maybe could be organized more effectively.

The last one I was interested in reviewing was "TeachPhysed" a Learning Object Repository. Much to my dislike the link brought me to a web site http://teachphysed.com/ with no real content. In my view MERLOT should remove this! I've reported it as a "broken link" on the MERLOT site.

I was quite disappointed overall with the quality of the material I reviewed. Only one out of three did actually exist.. Probably not many PE teachers are involved in MERLOT. I expect it to be different in other subject areas and look forward to the blog posts of others.