Scaling the Peer Review Process for National STEM Education Digital Library Collections

NEEDS agrees to work with MERLOT to meet the objectives outlined in the proposal Scaling the Peer Review Process for National STEM Education Digital Library Collections. Several of the important outcomes of this work include: community building services, leadership in developing evaluation mechanisms, and expansion and development of
courseware evaluation mechanisms.
The proposed work builds upon the foundation set with NEEDS - A Digital Library for Engineering Education, a founding partner of the SMETE Open Federation. NEEDS is the distributed architecture developed by Synthesis: A National Engineering Education Coalition to enable new
pedagogical models based on Internet mediated learning environments. NEEDS catalogs courseware and other instructional technology being developed nationally and internationally to provide a resource where learners can search, access and download materials to support their learning process. In addition NEEDS developed evaluation criteria for the Premier Award for Excellence in Engineering Education. The Premier Award is an annual award, sponsored by John Wiley & Sons, Autodesk, Mathworks and Microsoft Research, recognizes outstanding, non-commercial courseware designed to enhance engineering education (see www.needs.org/premier/).
NEEDS' extensive experience with developing criteria for evaluating digital learning materials, implementing peer review at the premier level, and working with other digital libraries interested in developing peer and Premier Awards will be a significant benefit to the work described in this proposal. As this project evolves, we anticipate the active involvement of other SMETE Open Federation members in developing review criteria, developing review teams, and testing the prototype peer review tutorial.We will be active participants on the design team; we will help develop and program the template architecture and test it. Our collaboration with MERLOT on this project will effectively facilitate the development, promotion and dissemination of the tutorial, as well as peer and Premier review mechanisms.
In support of the vision outlined in this NSDL Services proposal, NEEDS agrees to work with MERLOT to:
> Capture, model and validate the processes peer reviewers use when evaluating instructional technology.
> Test the usability of the tutorial within the engineering community and facilitate testing with other STEM discipline communities.
> Implement the tutorial within an engineering peer review process and with the Premier Award for Excellence in Engineering Education Courseware.