The world is changing. Education is changing. There are numerous forces pulling and tugging at educators' and administrators' time, vision, and budgets. As I am writing this, 2017 is right around the corner. As I read through the articles of this issue, I find some familiar themes: quality of student advisement, making personal connections between instructors and students, giving consistent communication from administrative offices, questions of ease of transfer credit, financial constraints on our students and our programs, being willing to listen to one another, and how to give clear feedback to students. What will the new year bring? Stability or chaos; funding or further budget cuts; enrollment increases or decreases? I think all this reflection brought me to our first article. This issue begins with a review of 25 years of one university's lessons learned in continuing education.
Hou and Rogers, authors of “Lessons in University Continuing Education: A 25-Year Perspective,” demonstrate how administrators in continuing education can use their data to make informed decisions. We can project our future by analyzing the data from the past. However, as an editor, I have a second reason for including this article. I am very pleased to see them write it for publication. I know many continuing education offices capture data and use it for decision-making purposes. I encourage you to use Hou and Rogers as an example of how to turn data into an academic manuscript.
Education is now a global market, and I am so happy to include two articles in this issue with international settings. As an editor, I am always looking at what is best for JCHE. A hallmark of journal expansion is having international readers and articles. I think readers from any location will find these articles informative.
Andrade, van Rhijn, and Coimbra bring us a perspective from Portugal. While the setting of this research is in Portugal, this team of writers is also internationally diverse (demonstrating how we can write and publish with international colleagues). Every nation is looking at their workforce, and we know that a more highly educated workforce has potential economic benefits for all nations. Increasingly, higher education administrators’ and faculty's understanding of how to support adult learners is integral to the success of the student and to the national workforce.
Richards, Bell, and Dwyer's article provides the Australian context. The institutional structures may be different, but the message is key to all educators: we need to provide opportunities for faculty to learn how to provide quality feedback to students.
Walker and Okpala examine the nontraditional learner from the perspective of the transfer student. Student retention is a constant concern for all programs, especially when enrollments are declining or just maintaining. Their research takes place at a historically Black university, which has its unique needs and structures as well.
The Best Practices article, written by Hennessey, has another unique setting: National Geospatial-Intelligence College, which provides professional development to government and contract employees and active-duty military service members. This best practice focuses on providing development of our instructors to help them learn how to teach a group of adult learners. For all those looking for a rubric or observation form to evaluate instructors, this article might contain just what you have been searching for.
Rebecca Klein-Collins is JCHE's current Contributing Editor for the Prior Learning Assessment (PLA). She brings an article by Jillian Klein to this issue. Competency-based education is another new player in the land of higher education. In 2014, The Experimental Site Initiatives (created by the U.S. Congress to focus on educational innovative delivery) allowed institutions to award Title IV federal financial aid toward the cost incurred by PLA. The preliminary results reported in this article suggest this would be a great benefit to our adult learners who are making faster progress toward degree completion. Rebecca has been JCHE’s contributing editor for the PLA articles for three years. This is the last time we will have a piece from her in this journal, but she is writing and working with the publications of the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning. I want to thank Rebecca for her service to JCHE. She has brought us so many new articles from many different writers. We will miss her as the PLA Contributing Editor.
I must admit that as a practitioner reading this journal in the late 1990s and early 2000s I always flipped to the Notes and Trends section first. There were always fascinating articles that I had missed and soon researched from the links provided. I hope readers continue to find this column enlightening. Mary Bonhomme provides the Notes and Trends column. We are grateful for Mary's hard work in combing through numerous articles to bring to us interesting news.
Finally, the Distance Learning Exchange article, by Schulte and colleagues, focuses on career pathways. If any reader is not up-to-date on this phenomenon, then I highly recommend catching up. Career pathways for workers as they transition from education into jobs are being mapped by organizations and corporations. Higher education institutions need to be in the conversation in order to integrate career pathways. I highly recommend reading this article by Schulte and her team.
This issue demonstrates just how diverse the educational world has become. We have international, professional development, competency-based education, and career pathways all represented. I hope you realize from this issue that good practices and research can be found in numerous settings and higher education is more than for-credit courses taught during the day for 50 minutes. May we start this new year with the scales of innocence and closed-mindedness peeled away from our eyes and be willing to embrace innovative practices. Let us not lose the spirit of love for adult learners and the passion to help them achieve their goals for a brighter future.