Welcome to JOLT from the MERLOT Executive Director

Welcome to the inaugural issue of the MERLOT Journal of Online Learning and Teaching (JOLT). We are proud to launch this peer-reviewed publication, designed to promote the scholarship of teaching and learning with technology in higher education. MERLOT is a community people who take the time to help faculty and students save time and improve success in teaching and learning by sharing online learning materials and advice. JOLT is a creation of MERLOT members Edward Perry (The University of Memphis) and Tracy Penny-Light (University of Waterloo) who are Editors of our Peer Review Boards and who are also JOLT’s Editors. We are grateful for their expertise and dedication to helping the academic community learn how and why technology affects teaching and learning.

The objectives of JOLT parallel those of MERLOT while focusing on the scholarship side of our mission to:

• Enable faculty to use technology effectively in teaching and learning by learning from a community of researchers and scholars;
• Enable academic programs to design and deploy academic technology to optimize teaching and learning;
• Build a community around the research and scholarly use of multimedia educational resources.

JOLT seeks to fill the void in today’s current journals by disseminating research on and about teaching and online learning for practitioners. Our audience is broad and includes faculty members, instructors, instructional designers, IT administrators and faculty developers whose daily responsibility is to make online teaching and learning effective. The articles published in JOLT will also provide academic recognition for our colleagues producing the research we all need to develop more successful educational programs. Please join us by contributing to this growing community of scholars and scholarship.

Gerry Hanley
MERLOT Executive Director