LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

Welcome to the fourth issue of Teaching and Learning Excellence through Scholarship (TALES) from the Community College of Baltimore County(CCBC)! I hope you appreciate the diverse range of insights from our authors as much as I did. The opening perspective is an inspiring peek at a project that puts community college voices in the spotlight and continues to garner praise for doing so. The issue also contains featured tales, each from outside CCBC, showcasing community college efforts to support students by cultivating workplace skills and reducing costs through open educational resources in addition to supporting faculty with targeted technology training. This year’s research articles, all from CCBC faculty, center repeatedly on the quest to leverage classroom engagement to boost student success. They present the results from employing a variety of techniques from team Jeopardy to role play and forming real-world content connections to plickers. Are plickers new to you? They were new to me too! Check out the article on improving exam performance in business law to learn more. I also learned a lot from the review article on gender representation in engineering programs – as a female scientist I am frequently reminded that even in 2024 women still have strides to make towards equity in education. At least I can attest that TALES, from our editorial board to our reviewers and authors and hopefully you too, dear readers, has strong female representation.

At the tender age of 4, TALES is still in its formative years (preschool here we come!) and we are maturing steadily. Beyond the articles herein, major accomplishments this year include partnering with the Maryland Distance Learning Association for the first time to publish proceedings of their spring conference and awarding our inaugural “Best CCBC Research Paper” to Tim Faith and Glenda Breaux for their investigation of the impact of open educational resources on student success. TALES was even featured in its own article—it was the Member Spotlight for June 2024 at the League for Innovation in the Community College.

Each of these are major accomplishments for our young journal, but there is one more achievement that really stands to launch TALES to broad audiences. In spring 2024, TALES was invited by the Education Resources Information Center (https://eric.ed.gov/) to be indexed in their database. This is a true validation of TALES’ relevance to the larger education community! We can really impact the public literature on scholarship now. In fact, if you search for “teaching squares” and narrow the results to peer-reviewed, open-access articles from 2-year colleges, you will yield a total of 3 results. The featured tale on CCBC's Teaching Squares Program by Krish Palaniswamy represents 33% of the available articles on this topic in our country’s main educational database! You too can contribute your insights to TALES, and in doing so your efforts will ripple out to a wider readership. We would welcome your contribution!

Until the next issue,

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