Intervention Design In Online Training For In-service Teachers

Rapid and ongoing growth of the internet and web-based technology coupled with the innovation of education field create a new remarkable need for researches into web-based distance education. This research was initiated by a number of questions, such as how to make use of the real value of distance education, and how to employ distance learning to facilitate the professional development for in-service teachers via online training. As a type of system engineering, distance education covers multiple fields, such as, instruction, organization, management, implementation, etc. Learned from literature studies, there is a very important trend to explore the instructional design and explore the webagogy (online pedagogy or Netpedagogy or electronic pedagogy) in online learning environment. With respect to webagogy, substantial amount of literatures dealing with the development of facilitation strategies are found, which are proved to be effective in facilitating online learning. However, these literatures mostly focused on developing or designing the facilitation strategies from the direction of role-transformation of the instructor and learner, but seldomly considered learning interventions from the perspective of system and environment. The primary goal of this dissertation is to construct the theory hypothesis and explore problems from the perspective of total design of system interventions, in which the distance training system was metaphoric as an ecosystem and an ecology environment, and distance training was a process of environmental adaptation. This research is based upon the case study of online teacher training for 50 days, in which, survey data, interviews, and observation methods were used to identify the effectiveness of designing and research, furthermore, the descriptive statistics and content analysis methods were used to process the data generated in the training process to verify the learner's development and transformation. Finally, the research results revealed that the online intervention design is effective from the perspective of adapting environment, according to the (TSI) system thinking. The further research is to enhance and revise the online intervention design and environment adaptation framework. Hopefully, this research will lead to some new understandings in online instruction design or the webagogy by providing system intervention thinking and the perspective of environment adaptation.This dissertation is composed of three parts: The first part describes the purpose, questions and the major theoretical principles of the research. Chapter One provides an overview of the relevant literatures to define the research goals. Chapter two describes the basic theories to generate the research hypothesis and research questions that can facilitate the following research.The second part presents the theoretical framework and the specific intervention design. Based on the first section, Chapter Three begins with the utilization of the basic theories, analyses the online training system, and then constructs the theoretical framework. In Chapter four, under the direction of the theoretical framework, it details online intervention design. Take a real online training for example, online intervention design is explained from three aspects.The third part touches upon the empirical study of the framework. Chapter Five focuses on the collection and process of data. Through analyzing the data generated and collected in the course of the training, evidences can be found for verifying the rational and effective validities of intervention design.Finally, a summary of study findings is provided with an outline of study results, ended with some indications to merits, demerits and the further orientations associated with this research.