Determination of instructors' competencies in online learning

Increasement in the technology use in education and instruction led to a rise in demands towards distance education. Today, many universities offer distance education programs in order to meet this demand and to support life-long learning. Like teachers? competencies in traditional education, distance educators are expected to have particular competencies. These competencies may vary from one university to other since each university has different needs and substructure (i.e., administrative approaches, lack of technical infrastructure or personal). That is why, it is also necessary to determine the competencies of teachers who are teaching in distance education programs for our country. Despite the rapid development and quantitative increasement in the number of distance education programs in Turkey, teachers? roles, skills, and competencies have not clearly been determined, yet. It is observerd that roles, skills and sufficiency of instructors that are giving distance education courses are not throughly investigated.This study aims to investigate proficiency of educators who give distance education courses in Turkey. To this end, literature review was conducted and a Likert type questionnaire was formed based on the related studies. The questionnaire included 49 items with eight factors and it was called ?the Online Educator Proficiencies Questionnaire.? Total of 209 educators completed the form fully. Its Cronbach Alpha value is 0.964. The results show that educators? proficiency scores were higher in content area than in distance education. Also, their proficiencies in designing educational software are limited. Based on the results, it is suggested that educators need to attend professional development programs with the goal of digital educational material. Also, it is critical to encourage those educators to use Internet more for educational purposes. Keywords: Distance Education, Online Learning, Online Teacher Qualifications, Competencies