Clarifying Distance Education Roles and Competencies: Exploring Similarities and Differences Between Professional and Student-Practitioner Perspectives

The authors utilized a Delphi technique to explore roles and competencies as identified and ranked by 106 upper level graduate student-practitioners from eleven academic programs specializing in distance education. Responses were compared to two previous studies utilizing distance education expert/scholar respondents. Although the roles identified were similar to previous studies, the highest rated competencies in the current study emphasized technical expertise to a greater degree than did the previous practitioner/scholar studies. Results included consensus on fourteen distance education roles and twenty-one core competencies.