MERLOT should look like Pinterest

I am a moderate user of Pinterest. By that I mean that I occasionally sit down with my phone, open the Pinterest app, and browse through the latest pins from the people I follow. I also occasionally pin a teaching-related resource to my Teaching in Higher Ed pinboard when I find something interesting at work. What I love about Pinterest is that, as a moderate user of the tool, I can pick and choose when I want to engage with it based on my interests and my needs. For example, one day I may get an inkling to sew something for my friend who is due with baby girl #2 in August. I go to Pinterest and I can view the pins I have saved or browse new pins to help me find a tutorial I can use.

Now let’s look at MERLOT and other OER (Open Educational Resource) websites. I have found OER sites to be clunky, difficult to navigate, and difficult to use quickly and effectively. For instance, if I want to find a tutorial or interactive for my Early Childhood Development classes, I have to navigate my way through a series of menus, filters, and information pages that link me to external OERs. I often arrive at those OERs many clicks (and minutes) later and find that they in no way address what I need. OH THE FRUSTRATION!!

But imagine…imagine if MERLOT looked like Pinterest. In my imaginary world, I go to MERLOT and see a page filled with “pins” of the latest and most popular OERs. From the images on the pins, I can see how the resources look and I can more easily identify whether resources are useful to me. I can also follow the OER “pins” of people I admire in higher education, see what they are using in their courses, and create my own OER pin boards that highlight resources I like or use.

A Pinterest-like interface would also encourage more random browsing through resources that look interesting—something that is absolutely not encouraged by the current MERLOT interface. A Pinterest-like interface may even help me, a novice OER user, to collect ideas for OERs that I might want to create by giving me the ability to “mix” OERs  on categorized pin boards. In short, a Pinterest-like MERLOT would allow me as a user to very quickly and easily engage with OERs when I want or need them.

Now, I am picking on MERLOT only because I think it has enormous potential as an OER website. I could have just as easily picked on OER Commons (though their interface is slightly less infuriating). My point is that I think all OER websites can learn from Pinterest about how to make their resources more interesting, approachable, accessible, and community-driven.

You know what? I think we need to move this idea forward…it’s time for action. Who’s interested?

Chaos  image from FlickrCC user Nrbelex, used with permissions of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.