This issue closes out the thirty-first volume of The American Journal of Distance Education with several articles that rise from a variety of contexts and that cover a range of topics within the field.
Joseph A. Rios and Ou Lydia Liu look at online proctored and unproctored Internet test administration.
Karen Miner-Romanoff, Jonathan McCombs, and Lewis Chongwony study the effectiveness of interactive and experiential tools in a criminal justice course setting.
David T. Culkin considers military design methodology and how it can inform program evaluation of online distance learning.
Anant Deshpande and Valeri Chukhlomin identify various elements of a particular MOOC and examine their relationships to student motivation.
Earlier this year, at the Annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning in Madison, Wisconsin, I had the privilege of presenting the 2017 Mildred B. and Charles A. Wedemeyer Award to Jessica M. Nicklin, Laurel A. McNall, Christopher P. Cerasoli, Claire M. Varga & R. J. McGivney – for the work on their article entitled Teaching Online: Applying Need Theory to the Work-family interface. In their article, the authors examined work-life balance and work outcomes among collegiate faculty teaching courses online. During a well-attended and interesting session presentation, the authors noted that they are working on a follow-up study, which we can look forward to. The Wedemeyer Award selection for the best journal article is made every other year by representatives of this journal as well as a panel of colleagues from the Annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning.
Additionally, at the conference, I was pleased to see that one of the topics for future discussion that arose from the research symposium is to explore how researchers can organize and take action (based upon the findings of their research) in order to influence organizational and governmental policy. On this topic, as a follow-up to my previous editorial, I encourage our readers to become involved and to advocate for policies that ultimately allow us to better serve our students.