Communications Education & Training: Scholarship of Research and Supervision in Communications

The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) encourages teachers and educators to examine their own classroom practice, record their successes and failures, and ultimately share their experiences in a formal and scholarly way so that others may reflect on their findings and build upon existing teaching and learning processes. SoTL acknowledges that concerns for privacy and other ethical issues associated with studies involving human subjects place limits on the types of research that can be conducted in the classroom setting. Nevertheless, SoTL provides a mechanism for raising the standard of discussion concerning teaching and learning in the literature. The Scholarship of Research and Supervision (SoRL) is a related concept that invites the same reflective approach to improving the quality of training through research, especially that conducted at the postgraduate level. This Feature Topic on SoTL is intended to hasten the incorporation of SoTL and SoRL into communications engineering curricula by providing educators and researchers with an opportunity to share their experience, best practices, and case studies. The articles run the gamut from case studies in experiential learning and research-oriented courses to a comprehensive study of student understanding of key concepts to a novel framework for conducting lab-based courses.