Northcentral University Doctoral Education Student Honored with Third National Award

Prescott Valley, Arizona—September 22, 2008 — Northcentral University (www.ncu.edu), an innovator in online higher education is pleased to recognize the achievement of Terry Morris in winning the MERLOT Award for Exemplary Online Learning Resources. Ms. Morris is pursuing her doctor of education degree at NCU, specializing in eLearning and Online Teaching.

MERLOT is the acronym for Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching which, since 1997, has evolved into a collaborative project working to develop evaluation standards and peer review processes for online teaching-learning material. The project originated with the California State University Center for Distributed Learning and now includes 23 institutional partners and more than 60,000 individual members and comprises a leading edge, user-centered, searchable collection of peer reviewed and selected higher education, online learning materials, catalogued by registered members and a set of faculty development support services.

Professor Morris was honored with the 2008 MERLOT Business Classic Award for her multimedia presentation, E-Commerce Business Ethics Case Study. “The case study is presented in a multimedia format,” Morris says, “using Flash movies which describe the company background, scenarios of business ethics issues, and an overview of ethical decision-making.” The case studies, using the hypothetical company E-Kin, were written by graduate students of Dr. Beverly Kracher at Creighton University.” The presentation can be viewed at http://www.merlot.org/.

Dr. Clinton Gardner, NCU president, was pleased to again acknowledge an honor for Ms. Morris. "We are exceptionally proud of all our NCU students,” he said, “but to have one consistently honored in the field of online learning is especially gratifying to NCU and our eLearning curriculum development."

The MERLOT award is not the first time Morris has been recognized for her work. An associate professor of education at Harper College, in Palatine, Illinois, she was chosen by the Instructional Technology Council (ITC) as the recipient of their 2008 Outstanding e-Learning Faculty Award for Excellence and in 2006 earned the Blackboard Greenhouse Exemplary Online Course Award for use of Internet technology in the academic environment. Prior to that, William Rainey Harper College had honored her with the 2002-2003 Glenn A. Reich Memorial Award for Instructional Technology. Morris is also the author of the textbook, Web Developer Foundations: Using XHTML, now in its 4th edition.

Professor Morris has a BA in Mathematics from Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago and an MS in Information Systems from Roosevelt University in Chicago—both degrees earned with honors. She also has a Master Online Teacher Certificate from the Illinois Online Network at the University of Illinois.