Journal on Excellence in College Teaching, Volume 13, Numbers 2 and 3

The case method, at its core, is a shared effort in education. It relies upon the active participation of a host of contributors in a union established to achieve a community result greater than that which could be attained by individual effort. At many levels it is a joint venture among subjects, researchers, teachers, and students. As in all joint ventures, the most successful are those that enable all participants to benefit from the association and to learn from each other. This special issue is literally a joint venture. It is published jointly by Miami University's Journal on Excellence in College Teaching, the North American Case Research Association's (NACRA) Case Research Journal, and the Society for Case Research's (SCR) Business Case Journal. The reviewers for the articles included in this issue came from the ranks of NACRA and SCR, and I had the great privilege of acting as Guest Editor in addition to my role as current Editor of the Case Research Journal. The publication of a special issue on the case method reflects growth in the use of active learning techniques, of which the case method is a subset. Problem-based learning (PBL) has been increasingly embraced in higher education, and the case method may be viewed as a subset of that approach to learning as well. Indeed, all of the articles in this issue share the common theme that active learning in general, and the case method specifically, provides extraordinary benefits over traditional methods of instruction. The articles also seem to say that in each of the diverse fields covered in them, there is a trend toward greater use of the case method, despite the difficulties, constraints, and pitfalls inherent in the process.