Letter from the Editors

Abstract

This issue of The International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning 13(2) presents fourteen research articles, on topics ranging from faculty onboarding to factors affecting students’ completion of extra-credit assignments, and one reflective essay on faculty resistance to treating students as partners in the learning process. As with our previous issue in this volume, both the breadth of the subject disciplines addressed and the quality of our international contributors reflects the ever-increasing acceptance of the efficacy of SoTL. Countless practitioners continue to demonstrate both the productive nature of reflecting on our practice and the necessity of linking our scholarship with our teaching. With this issue, IJSoTL is midway through this transitional volume, number 13. We’re moving from publishing issues in July and January to publishing issues in May and November. Rather than produce a volume with only one issue, we’ve opted to create a volume with three issues. Issue #1 was published in January of 2019. Issue #2, published in May 2019, is before you. Issue #3 will be published in November of 2019. After this volume we’ll be more accurately aligned with a traditional academic schedule, and so the two issues of volume 14 will be published in May and November of 2020. We regularly review our readership data, and when we looked over our statistics from the past year (May 2018 to May 2019), we noticed several interesting trends. During this time, the 533 articles published in IJSoTL were downloaded over 117,000 times. More than 50,000 of those downloads came from just two countries, the United States and the Philippines. Another 30,000 came from the remainder of the ten countries where we have the greatest readership: the United Kingdom, Canada, Indonesia, Australia, India, Malaysia, South Africa, and Pakistan. Of those ten countries, at least half of them—depending on who’s doing the categorizing—could be considered part of the Global South, economically disadvantaged nation-states. We’re proud of this readership distribution. It demonstrates to us, among other things, that concern about the effectiveness of education is not reserved solely for developed societies. Indeed, we could argue that such concern is necessary in order for a political entity or culture to develop in the first place. Rather than resort to trial-and-error or rely on anecdotes, tradition, or acquiescence to the status quo, educators and policy makers in the developing world are looking for evidence-based methods and solutions for their post-secondary institutions. We are pleased to play some small part in that process. Producing IJSoTL, and maintaining our high standards for academic rigor and writing, would not be possible without the hard work of the members of our Editorial Board. Their work in the review process is crucial; we rely on their acumen hundreds of times for each issue. We continue to seek nominations (including self-nominations) for these positions. If you’re interested, please post to us at [email protected].