THE USE OF OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES IN ENGINEERING EDUCATION: A CASE STUDY OF MATCHING THE HEAT TRANSFER ENGINEERING TOPICS AND THE MERLOT DATABASE

Open educational resources (OER) are freely accessible, openly licensed text, media, and other digital assets that are useful for teaching, learning, and assessing as well as for research purposes. Then, OER cover use and reuse, repurposing, and modification of the resources. They include free use for educational purposes by teachers and learners, and encompass all types of digital media. MERLOT (Multimedia Education Resource for Learning and Online Teaching), at www.merlot.org, is an online repository and international consortium of institutions (and systems) of higher education, industry partners, professional organizations and individuals. MERLOT partners and members are devoted to identifying, peer reviewing, organizing and making available existing online learning resources in a range of academic disciplines for its use by higher education faculty and students. MERLOT is a community of staff, volunteers, and members who work together in various ways to provide users of OER teaching and learning materials with a wealth of services and functions that can enhance their instructional experience. The MERLOT collection of OER is noteworthy among others because of the quality of the learning materials in the collection. These materials are catalogued in a variety of ways, one of the most important being the academic discipline in which the learning material might be best used for teaching and learning. At the Engineering collection, it can be found lots of resources on a wide variety of topics ranging from aerospace engineering to petroleum engineering to help teachers with their teaching and research. Heat transfer is a basic discipline in many engineering curricula such as aeronautical, mechanical, electrical, chemical, mining or petroleum engineering, then available OER related to this topic could be of interest for a broad range of lecturers and students in many technology topics. This contribution presents the case study on how teachers match the available resources of MERLOT concerning the heat transfer engineering topic with the curricula on the same in Mechanical, Electronics and Management Engineering degrees. The present MERLOT heat transfer collection consists of online courses, open access textbooks and simulations. By means of three examples, an analysis on how the learning potential of OER can match the expected learning outcomes, skills and engineering content of the respective engineering degrees is presented. The contribution could be of help to those engineering teachers looking for integrating available OER in its educational practice