The NYSUT Community College Distance Education Committee (CCDEC), comprising representatives from SUNY community colleges across the state, explores issues and concerns related to distance education. Our members range from novices to veterans, from cyberprofessors to skeptics. We teach fully online, hybrid, and web-enhanced courses and work at institutions that offer just a few online courses as well as at institutions that offer entire degrees online.

We are educators who care deeply about how distance education affects teaching, learning, and research and who seek collegial methods to ensure that — above all else — a concern for high standards and quality education, not financial profit, drives distance education policies and practices in our locals.

To help other locals achieve these goals in their contract and policy language, we published Negotiating the Distance in Fall 2003 which provides suggestions and sample contract language for 10 major issues in distance education.