Canadian educational institutions are actively involved in the creation of innovative products and processes designed to improve the quality of learning. Examples of these products may include the development of learning objects, a virtual course, or a technology-mediated learning environment in support of face-to-face delivery.

Quite often, an educator who seeks to enhance learning through the creation of these objects does so with considerable costs in both time and money. The result is the loss of opportunity for other teaching, research and service priorities.

Because scholarship at the post-secondary level has traditionally been restricted to the print media, there is little or no formal evaluation accorded to an educational object, to its innovators, or to the process of creation. Typically, evaluation committees have difficulty in assessing the value of educational innovation due to their lack of expert knowledge and an absence of any systematic process to evaluate the quality of the product.

A critical component of the BELLE evaluation process is the Peer Review of Instructional Technology Innovation (PRITI) Project led by Tim Buell and Terry Anderson. PRITI has a twofold purpose: first, it examines the models and approaches related to teaching evaluation, academic peer review, learning object evaluation, and scholarly teaching. Secondly, a model(s) and set of ãtools,ä validated and tested by experts at collaborating institutions, is being developed to assess the scholarly contributions of individual faculty members at the partner institutions.