An e-competence profile for teachers in higher education

Competence is normally ascribed to individuals as a qualification on the basis of the requirements of role definitions and job profiles. Competence, however, can also be ascribed to organisations. Educational institutions, for example, have the competence to certify, a competence that individual teachers do not have. In addition to this, competence is increasingly being ascribed to technologies. Automated knowledge management and e-learning systems are competent to evaluate the relevance and quality of information, to assess skills, interpret learning preferences, suggest learning paths and even to assist in decision making. This raises the question of how the complex interaction of human individuals, organisational processes and structures, and intelligent technologies can lead to a new understanding of the competence profile of teachers in higher education. The Actor Network Theory offers a model of hybrid, network-based forms of social order that can be used to define competence as a quality equally distributed among individuals, organisations and technologies, and which is not ascribable to any one of these alone.