PARTICIPANTS – STUDENTS AND FACULTY

A direct link exists between a school's mission, the characteristics of students served by the educational programs, the composition and qualifications of the faculty members providing the programs, and the overall quality of the school.  Therefore, these standards focus on maintaining a mix of both student and faculty participants that achieve high quality in the activities that support the school’s mission.  For the purpose of these standards “faculty” refers to all instruction-related faculty members, including tenured, non-tenured, full-time, part-time, clinical, etc., as appropriate.

Learning by students as they prepare for business, management, or academic careers is strongly dependent on the quality of instruction offered to them.  Faculty members and administrators share responsibility for ensuring instructional quality through continuous improvement and innovation.  As they implement this responsibility, faculty members, administrators, and staff continue their own learning.  As participants in the learning enterprise, students also are responsible to take an active role in their learning experiences.  Passive learning should not be the sole, or primary, model for collegiate business education.

The aspirations of individual schools may create circumstances unforeseen in these more general statements.  It is the responsibility of the Peer Review Team and the Business Accreditation Committee to judge the reasonableness of any deviations from interpretations of the standards. 

Intent of Participants Standards
Participants standards substantiate the characteristics, interactions, and utilization of the human resources that constitute the learning community of the school.  Participants and their interactions are at the center of much of what defines quality for higher education in business.  Therefore, seeing that the proper processes are in place to secure and manage participant resources constitutes a key evaluation in assessing educational quality.  The participants in a degree program (students, faculty members, staff, and administrators) are all part of a learning community playing out interacting roles in the educational process.  This is true in traditional educational arrangements with face-to-face interactions on an institutional campus, and it is equally true in more recent, technology-mediated education where some, or all, of the interactions take place electronically.  All of the participants are co-producers of learning.

These participants standards assess quality in the educational process regardless of the variety of:

• Pedagogy or communication technologies utilized.
• Contractual arrangements of participants to the institution.
• Methods of dividing the components of the educational tasks among faculty members and staff.

Reviewers must make essential judgments concerning whether the intellectual resources among the participants reach the level required for quality higher education, whether the processes that manage participant resources honor the school's mission, and whether quality is maintained in implementation of the school's programs.  Where schools use nontraditional resources for faculty or arrange interactions in nontraditional ways, the burden is on the school to demonstrate that it maintains educational quality.

            » Expectations Regarding Student-Faculty Interaction