By Susan Stuart, KCKCC

A little over ten years ago, the Colleague 2 Colleague Steering Committee began thinking about how we might expand the reach and usefulness of the C2C mission  We wanted to provide more opportunities for Distance Learning and Instructional Technology staff and administrators to stay current and share our knowledge and experience to better serve our students, faculty, and institutions.  The value of having an organization like C2C has always been the collective knowledge of its members shared openly and freely made each of us better.  We knew there was more we could add to the conversation.

There were many discussions about ways we could do this, newsletters, more special topic face to face forums, web conferences, showcases, etc.  As I look back at my notes from those discussions (yes, I still have them), one of the most interesting consensus was that web-conferences generally had low attendance and low registration and were not worth the effort.  Little did we know that COVID-19 would come along and change the way we think about virtual conference attendance!

This magazine came out of that desire to find an additional way to engage share and inform.  Topics covered in that first magazine include:

From start to finish the first magazine was a way to provide a service to the educational community.  It has continued over that last 10 years to stay that way.  Each article is contributed by a C2C member whose goal is to provide insight, lessons learned, and guidance to readers.  I continue to be proud that something that started as this vague idea of wanting to continue helping and supporting our colleagues has grown into this wonderful publication that has become a vital part of our professional world. 

Thank you so much for the work of the editorial, creative, and technical volunteers and the generous authors who share their work to make this digital magazine possible.

The first issue of the C2C Lantern is available here. 

Susan Stuart has been the Director of Online Education Services at Kansas City Kansas Community College for over 14 years and has over 30 years experience in the design and development of distance and distributed learning in a both the academic and commercial settings.  She had a Masters Degree (an MS) in Educational Technology from Pittsburg State University.  She was the C2C Chair when she and her team came up with the idea for a digital magazine for Colleague 2 Colleague.  

Her email is sstuart@kckcc.edu.