How open is MERLOT? A descriptive study of OER availability in a major learning object repository

The Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT) has long been regarded as a reputable source of open educational resources (OER). However, this reputation has rarely been subjected to systematic empirical scrutiny. This preliminary descriptive study examines how reliably MERLOT's Business section surfaces OER. Using a browsing-based methodology mirroring typical user behavior, 500 catalog records were manually evaluated across six access status categories. Results indicate that only 134 of 500 sampled resources (26.8%) qualify as OER under a definition requiring both open licensing and immediate accessibility. Of the 315 live links, 42.5% were OER, while 136 records (27.2%) resolved to dead links. Temporal analysis revealed a strong positive correlation between recency and OER status. Notably, peer review scores exhibited a negative correlation with OER likelihood among live resources, while user ratings showed a positive correlation—suggesting that MERLOT's peer review evaluates pedagogical quality rather than licensing openness. These findings suggest MERLOT may function less as a curated OER repository and more as a general learning object catalog in which OER constitute a minority of accessible resources. Concerns regarding metadata reliability, link persistence, and outdated pre-4.0 Creative Commons licenses are discussed alongside recommendations for MERLOT's review processes.