January, 2016
Dear Colleagues,
Welcome to UNBOUND: Reinventing Higher Education, a new online journal published by UPCEA, the association for leaders in professional, continuing and online education. The name UNBOUND calls to mind the many innovations that are taking place in education across our country and our world, where technology is helping us break the bonds of space and time to make education accessible and more affordable to a broad audience. As educators, we no longer have to think in terms of limits, whether those are drawn by campus boundaries, geographic location, seat time or even conventional definitions of credentialing and learning. As the tagline Reinventing Higher Education suggests, we are positioning this journal at the forefront of educational change. Our goal is to engage a broad audience of readers and contributors who are interested in important trends and innovations in education. Higher education, which is going through such dramatic change, has become too interconnected to be limited to any one audience. In addition to professionals in higher education, audiences and contributors may include leaders of corporations and industries, communities, advocacy groups, nonprofits or government bodies—anyone who cares deeply about the future of education.
Our new magazine will explore a broad range of timely and relevant issues in higher education, especially those that affect adult students and institutions that serve this unique population of learners. We will offer original articles, research, opinion pieces and reviews. Our online medium will also allow for video interviews and talks from prominent speakers and newsmakers, and immediate commentary and real-time discussion from our readers. Published biannually and open to the public, Unbound replaces UPCEA’s previous print journal, Continuing Higher Education Review, which had for many years been annually published by Harvard University.
As a past UPCEA president and dean of the School of Professional Studies at Northwestern University, I have thought for some time that our journal needed a new approach, one that was more relevant and accessible to professionals in our field and more broadly to those in the higher education community. We needed a journal that was readable, visually attractive and one that would engage in the national dialogue taking place among academic leaders. We needed for our voice to be heard, especially today as those in our field play an ever-increasing role in bringing innovation, new technologies and fresh approaches to teaching and learning on our campuses. I greatly hope you enjoy our first issue and I look forward to you becoming a regular reader and contributor of our magazine.
Sincerely,
Thomas F. Gibbons
Editor, Unbound
Northwestern University
View the Table of Contents for the inaugural issue of UNBOUND here.