LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

Welcome to the 6th issue of Teaching and Learning Excellence through Scholarship (TALES) from the Community College of Baltimore County (CCBC)! We owe this issue to the inquisitiveness of our authors, the thoughtful effort of our reviewers, and the interest of readers like you. Thank you! We also recognize CCBC’s Institute for Transformative Teaching, Learning and Leadership for providing the financial support that covers our publishing accounts. This funding enables TALES to produce issues without charging authors any fees and provide all our content open access for readers near and far. Whether you access TALES from our website, the Directory of Open Access Journals, or ERIC, you’ll always be able to read our content for free.

Fee-free content has been a core ethic of TALES from our first issue because we know that potential users will be much more likely to read articles that they can access at no cost. We can apply this logic to students and course learning materials too, and indeed the American Association of Colleges & Universities has recognized open educational resources as a high-impact practice. This issue showcases a featured tale that highlights the efforts of CCBC faculty to create and implement an open educational resource for a highly enrolled communications course to ease costs and enhance the learning experience for their students. A recurring focus on student support permeates this issue through every research article as well. Two articles dig into factors that impact developmental student success, one from Wor-Wic Community College researchers digging deep into student experiences in English courses and a complimentary study canvassing mathematics faculty about their perspectives on factors for student success. Both studies indicate students need approaches that increase their engagement in their courses to improve learning outcomes.

To that end, the additional research articles in this issue investigated approaches to boost student success, and they indicate promoting student engagement in class can be effective through a variety of practices. One study found positive results with interpersonal belongingness practices fostering engagement and perceived learning in psychology classes, and another showed pre-service teacher education could be improved by infusing relevant experiential learning in their curriculum. Two additional studies found video technology could be leveraged to students’ benefit, one using video feedback to personalize online interactions with students beyond typed comments showed higher pass rates in health while another study providing virtual simulation for case scenarios reduced nursing students’ anxiety about clinical decision-making.

Students thrive and higher education achieves its highest potential when we maintain our focus on providing the best education to our students that we can. The invited perspective by Danielle Holland, CCBC’s League Excellence award winner for 2025-2026, is a glimpse into the career of one educator and surprising insights into where inspiration for classroom excellence come from. We can each relate if we think back to the many positive and negative experiences we had in our own educational experience and realize how they have impacted the educators we’ve become. Thank you to all readers who share this passion for teaching and learning! You too can contribute your insights to TALES, and in doing so your efforts will add to the dialogue that shares knowledge for the greater pedagogical good. We would welcome your contribution!

To your enrichment—one page at a time,

Robin K. Minor, PhD | rminor@ccbcmd.edu
Editor-in-Chief
Community College of Baltimore County