The latest edition of the HAPS Educator is out, and it looks AMAZING! Kudos to Sarah and her team for adding “buttons” on the title page to immediately bring up the articles and for updating the format so brilliantly. You may have also noted that the title page looks very different – the articles are now divided into categories. Read on to learn about the how’s and the why’s of this change.
Following up on Valerie O’Loughlin’s President’s Initiative (2013-15), the HAPS Board of Directors tasked the HAPS Educator with refocusing the journal to promote educational scholarship by its members. However, we still wanted keep the journal open for some of the other types of articles that have proven beneficial to our members, such as topic updates and learning activities. So we began the process of reorganizing the journal to meet all our goals. While meeting with HAPS leadership in Atlanta in October, we teamed up with the Communications Committee to develop a plan.
First, all submissions must now have an educational focus. Be it a topic update or an experimental paper, the author must explicitly show how the article is relevant to better classroom practice. Second, authors now have five distinct publication options and the destination for the submission will depend both on its focus and its length. The submission categories include:
- HAPS Educator Educational Research: Papers published in this section of the HAPS Educator discuss pedagogical research projects that are supported by robust data. Eventually, we hope to include these articles in an educational research database such as ERIC.
- HAPS Educator Current Topics: Papers published in this section of the HAPS Educator will be crowd favorites and will provide a summary of a particular concept area. New for 2016, they will also include a short description of how the information can be used in our teaching.
- HAPS Educator Perspectives on Teaching: Articles published in this section will discuss a teaching philosophy or modality. Lengthy (more than 500 words) descriptions of teaching activities without accompanying data are also welcome in this section.
- Edu-Snippets: These useful nuggets are short descriptions of learning activities. These have always been a very popular part of the HAPS Educator, and in order to make them even MORE useful, we are developing a database of all Edu-Snippets, organized by body system, as a MEMBERS-ONLY RESOURCE!
- Blog Entries: If you want feedback during the early stages of a research project or want to provoke discussion, think about writing a BLOG ENTRY! Blogs are most effective if they are less than 500 words, although if you have more to say than that (don’t we ALL have more to say than that?!), consider putting together a series of blog entries.
So, fellow educators, we need your input to bring all of these possibilities to fruition. Our next HAPS Educator submission deadline is March 15. Click here to access “Instructions to Authors,” which includes all of the information that you need to get started!
Send Us Your Submissions Now!
- Sarah, Editor-in Chief, is waiting to receive your HAPS Educator submissions at editor@hapsconnect.org.
- Roberta, Snippet Queen, is waiting to receive your Edu-Snippets submissions at edu-snippets@hapsconnect.org.
- Wendy, Communication Committee chair, is waiting to receive your Blog entries at wriggs@hapsconnect.org.