Competency

Competency (5)

The five contracts that required competency required faculty teaching distance education courses to demonstrate proficiency in distance education teaching methods or their subject area prior to teaching their first distance education course. Competency is a permissive topic for bargaining.

Examples:

Observations. Neither the AAUP nor the vast majority of colleges in this study felt that language regarding competency was essential to include in faculty contracts. This may reflect the relative newness of this method of teaching. Many educators feel ill-qualified to judge the competency of distance education instruction. Also, while there are several tools for evaluating the quality of distance education courses, like the Quality Matters Rubric, there are fewer that determine the competency of the instructor or the quality of distance education teaching. Varvel (2007) established a comprehensive list of distance faculty competencies which colleges can use as a starting point for establishing their own list of relevant competencies.

This is also an area where equivalency should be an issue. If a college has no competency requirements for its traditional faculty, it should consider whether to add them for the traditional faculty or omit them for distance faculty.