Dear Readers,

It is my pleasure to introduce the Journal of Applied Learning in Higher Education (JALHE), volume 12, 2026, published by Missouri Western State University. The fifteen articles gathered here come from authors at colleges, universities, and partner organizations in seven states and two other countries, including members of our own Missouri Western Community, and from disciplines as varied as plant science, emergency management, respiratory therapy, engineering technology, linguistics and education, psychology, histology, economic development, and the social sciences. What unites them is a shared conviction that students learn most deeply when they put knowledge to work through various applied learning initiatives, and a shared willingness to look closely at what actually happens when they do.

Several contributions take up the question of how to bring authentic, real-world problems into the courses students are already taking. Barat offers a five-stage, classroom-based experiential learning model in which students act as co-creators, identifying community partners, defining organizational problems, and testing their recommendations against stakeholder feedback, which offers an accessible alternative to resource-intensive placements. Aguilar Murillo and colleagues draw on three years of a community-engaged course in bilingual language acquisition and education to distill five transferable lessons, chief among them that meaningful partnerships rest on relationship-building and reciprocity rather than charity. Two articles examine the bridge from classroom to career. Vanderleeuw and colleagues surveyed county economic development directors across four Midwestern states, whose advice to students returns again and again to communication, networking, and engagement with others. Reed and colleagues find, in a survey of 365 undergraduates, that participation in even one career-focused high-impact practice within a major or minor is associated with greater confidence in career preparation and communication.

A second group of articles focuses on applied learning in professional preparation. Studying a full-scale sheltering exercise that brought together students, community volunteers, and emergency preparedness partners, Fisher, Lindquist, and Falk report that participants perceived strong gains in applying the Incident Command System, coordinating with others, and taking preparedness action, even where pre/post score changes were modest, a useful reminder of how difficult learning transfer is to measure. Fisher, Halkia, and Azemi show that structured online discussion can function as an applied learning environment in emergency education, provided that prompts and rubrics explicitly ask students to compare, critique, and ground principles in practice. McDaris and Northrop propose a conceptual framework for how reflective simulation and structured debriefing may build emotional intelligence and resilience among respiratory therapy students, and they position open-access institutions as vital pathways into a profession facing serious workforce shortages.

Other authors examine how learning environments themselves are designed. Barta, Svojanovsky, and Szekely trace how an eight-week Plant Physiology course-based undergraduate research experience investigating the allelopathic molecule L-DOPA grew into a research-centered learning ecosystem spanning courses, disciplines, and institutions in the United States and Romania. Avdan reports that giving engineering technology students the freedom to collaborate with peers or work independently on open-resource assignments created a workplace-like setting that most students valued. Morse, drawing on four applied learning courses in manufacturing and engineering technology, proposes a framework for formative feedback that is distributed, time-decoupled, and multi-touch; although it emerged from HyFlex teaching, it applies well beyond hybrid classrooms.

It will surprise no reader that artificial intelligence runs through this issue. Kamali argues that AI, used with theoretical rigor and ethical awareness, can serve as an analytical scaffold that social science students interrogate, correct, and contextualize rather than simply accept. Belcher poses a larger question: if AI can support activity across every cognitive level, then education must shift its emphasis from “doing” to “becoming,” toward the development of judgment, agency, reflection, ethical responsibility, and intellectual identity. Allen grounds the conversation in everyday practice, examining how histology students create and use flashcards, the role AI plays in that process, and how students’ reflections opened classroom conversations about intentional study strategies.

Finally, two articles turn to the human relationships that sustain applied learning. Williamson and colleagues found that students receiving video feedback reported a greater sense of belonging and perceived more instructor care than with written comments, although they did not judge either format more useful or effective. Arnold and colleagues remind us that faculty need mentoring too; their needs assessment at a metropolitan university shows that what faculty seek from a mentor depends on their teaching experience and professional goals.

Reading these articles together, I am struck by how candid many of them are. Several are pilot studies, case studies, or conceptual frameworks, and their authors take care to distinguish students’ perceptions from measured learning and to acknowledge the limits of small samples. That candor is a strength. Applied learning asks students to act under uncertainty, reflect on what happened, and try again. These authors bring the same disposition to their scholarship, and in doing so they offer a foundation that others can test, adapt, and build on.

I am grateful to Missouri Western State University for supporting this applied learning endeavor, to the authors for their work and their responsiveness throughout revision; our esteemed panel of reviewers, whose thoughtful critique strengthened every manuscript, and to the Griffon Office of Applied Learning (GOAL) administrative coordinator for help with the overall publication process. I hope these pages spark ideas you can carry into your own classrooms, programs, and partnerships.

Tilottama “Tilo” Roy, Ph.D.
Executive Editor (Editor-in-Chief)
Journal of Applied Learning in Higher Education (JALHE)
Missouri Western State University
October 2026