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Often referred to as Faculty Qualifications, Credentialing is the process and documentation used to ensure that all teaching faculty have the appropriate academic credentials or other qualifications to be teaching the courses they teach. Most accrediting bodies require this, but they may vary in how detailed they want institutions to get in the reporting and documentation of this. For some regional and professional accrediting bodies, a list of faculty and their terminal degrees may be sufficient but for others, much more detail will be required.
Methods for Tracking Qualifications
Faculty Success provides two different ways that institutions can choose to document faculty qualifications. Our goals in developing these two approaches were:
- To develop something that would work regardless of Regional Accrediting Body
- To provide best practices so that clients are able to be somewhat consistent in practice
- To provide flexibility in approach
- To allow for client customization of terminology
- To provide base reports that would work with either option
The options developed below were tested with a subset of clients in the SACS, HLC and NWCCU accreditation regions.
Basic Approach
Education, Licenses & Certifications and Scheduled Teaching are all already captured in Faculty Success. To capture "additional qualifications", an additional read-only text box is added to the Permanent Data screen. Administrators can document the extenuating circumstances and other qualifications for teaching here and the field will be pulled into the Faculty Qualification report if it is populated.
Course Level Approach
For institutions that feel the need or requirement to document appropriate qualifications for each course taught and clearly link those qualifications to individual courses, an additional screen will be added to the system. The Teaching Qualifications screen allows the administrators to enter a qualification category, select the specific degrees, licenses/certifications and work history via record reference fields and add additional text and files to support the qualification and connect the relevant courses to that qualification.
The course level approach requires significant effort to initially populate and then maintain the information. For this reason, we provide a "best practice" approach to the initial population of the screen, as well as an Audit Report intended to be run each semester to alert the administrator(s) to any courses that are being taught that are not already documented on the Teaching Qualifications screen.
Implementing Faculty Qualification Tracking and Reporting
If your institution is accredited by HLC or SACS, consider requesting the full suite of reports that exist to support those accreditation requirements.
Read about those report suites here: SACSCOC Base Reports and here: HLC Base Reports.
For other institutions, you can request the Faculty Teaching Qualifications report.
All of these credentialing reports can support either approach noted above.