Welcome to the third issue of Teaching and Learning Excellence through Scholarship (TALES) from the Community College of Baltimore County! Depending on your perspective, 3 years can fly or crawl by, and somehow TALES’ trajectory has done both. An enormous amount of planning, collaboration, and editing have gone into each issue, and some of our manuscripts undergo many months of revision as they progress from concept to formatted page. It’s the attention to detail and focus on quality by TALES’ authors, peer reviewers, and editors that has produced our best issue yet for 2023 and this takes slow, steady effort. On the other hand, our work has been such rewarding, good fun that it seems like yesterday that we were considering what methods we’d use to publish our first issue. We’ve come a long way in a flash, and this third issue is a natural progression to our best product yet.
Opening this issue is an insightful perspective on 53(!) years of teaching for CCBC that is both witty and inspiring. It illustrates the kind of dedication that CCBC faculty bring to their classes when Dr. Stearns relates how she maintains contact with students decades later who continue to appreciate her for her guidance and support. This issue also boasts the most Featured Tales and research articles we’ve published yet. The articles range from large-scale, program-wide initiatives to single-section intervention studies, and each is a valuable recount of the authors’ efforts to improve higher education. They showcase initiatives both at CCBC and at outside institutions including the University of Maryland Eastern Shore and Montgomery College, a testament to the service that CCBC provides for our region by hosting an open academic journal that allows us to have a pedagogical discussion with our broader colleagues. I’m very pleased to report that this issue contains TALES’ first review paper, which is an academic survey of the existing literature on a topic where the authors summarize the overall state of the topic from the published accounts and provide their insights on the topic. The review paper in this issue looks at published efforts to foster connections between students in online classes and describes several techniques in detail that can adapt to all instructional modalities. This issue has something for everyone, and we hope you appreciate reading the articles as much as we enjoyed putting them together for you.
TALES looks forward to continuing to grow. We have been accepted to the Directory of Open Access Journals, and now that we have published our third issue we will also apply for inclusion in ERIC. The content in TALES is valuable, and we want to share it with as wide of an audience as possible. You can help us with this, and we ask you to please consider the roles you can take to promote the journal. Please read our articles and consider if any of the programs or interventions might be useful to you. Share links to articles with your colleagues and you’ll benefit both TALES and spread valuable knowledge. As you try new approaches in your classes consider contributing your own manuscript to the journal—we truly believe that each of us has insights to contribute!
Until the next issue,
Robin
Robin K. Minor, PhD | rminor@ccbcmd.edu
Editor-in-Chief
Community College of Baltimore County