Recently my department decided to offer our undergraduate Research Methods in Psychology course in a fully online format, and I am slotted to teach the first section in fall 2016. I have never taught an online class before and have mixed feelings about it.

The ostensible (and laudable) goal of offering this class fully online is to serve students who require it to complete their degrees but cannot attend classes in person because they have since started full time jobs or relocated, and so on. As such, this class will be fully online (i.e., no formal in-class meetings) and asynchronous (i.e., no formal real-time interactions between teacher and students). I have received fantastic support from my college to develop the class. I was awarded a year-long teaching fellowship by Baruch’s Center for Teaching and Learning to attend their series of workshops designed to support faculty in developing their hybrid/online classes.

We within the LGBT SIOP committee want to make a difference within the field of industrial-organizational psychology and within SIOP by increasing exposure to the experiences of sexual orientation and gender identity minorities within the realms of research and practice. We believe that one method by which this can occur is through making regular, novel contributions to the literature, by filling preexisting gaps may leave LGBT individuals overlooked. However, we realize that it is also important to educate researchers and practitioners who might not be familiar with the basic issues that LGBT people face.

Since its emergence, industrial-organizational psychology has been required to adapt to market trends, industry demands, and the increasing capabilities of technology in order to remain competitive; a challenge within an increasingly globalized market. The issue of globalization has been a “hot topic” for years, and remains one of the top challenges for related fields, including human resources management (Vorhauser-Smith, 2016) and has been identified by leading I-O practitioners as one of the key future directions for our field (Silzer & Cober, 2010). Moreover, with the increasing need for a cross-cultural understanding of organizational phenomena, those in academia are also recognizing the importance of global considerations in both the design and application of research. As a result, globalization has become a key consideration within our field for both research and practice, and should become formalized within graduate students’ learning and experiences. We present this column to encourage more holistic and globally aware graduates in I-O.

Neuroscience equipment is expensive and can be intimidating, which in turn discourages many from taking an organizational neuroscience approach to their work. Buying neurotechnologies for your research lab or company doesn’t have to be a scary undertaking. Knowledge is power, and just as Consumer Reports helps people buy a range of products, in this issue our conversation aims to support an informed investment in neurotechnologies.

For those of you with excellent memories, you’ll recall I mentioned in the last column I would discuss the Sustainable Development Goals in this issue’s column, as they were recently installed in September, 2015. However, being the savvy TIP reader you are, you’ll also recognize that a wonderful feature article was published last edition, not only explaining the SDGs but also identifying some key ways that I-O psychologists can get involved in the accomplishment of these goals (Foster et al., 2015). As such, it seems a bit redundant to talk about the SDGs in this column, and so we will move to another topic, with the potential for revisiting the SDGs in a future installation after some results and reports have been generated.