The Center for Assistive Technology and Environmental Access (CATEA) in the College of Architecture recently won a MERLOT (Mutltimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching) Classics award for their Access eLearning tutorial within their GRADE project web site. The Access eLearning tutorial won its award in the Faculty Development Discipline of the competition.

The MERLOT Awards program recognizes and promotes outstanding online resources designed to enhance teaching and learning and to honor the authors and developers of these resources for their contributions to the academic community.

Each of the MERLOT Editorial Boards selects an outstanding resource from its discipline to receive the MERLOT Classics award. The winners of the 2007 MERLOT awards were honored with a ceremony at the 2007 MERLOT International Conference, held August 7-10th in New Orleans, Louisiana.

The Access eLearning tutorial is a free, online ten-module tutorial that offers information, instructional techniques, and practice labs on how to make the most common needs in distance education accessible for individuals with disabilities, and enhance the usability of online materials for all students. The Faculty Development Editorial Board of MERLOT commented that it "believes this site is outstanding because it is relevant to instructors in all disciplines as well as those in the corporate world".