Human Resource Management Mode Of Network Education College In Pilot Universities

The pivotal role of distance education(DE) to the Chinese human resource advancement has been shown in its development plan in the next 50 years.Moreover, the development of DE organization is greatly influenced by the quality and capacity of its workers.Hence, it is strategically significant for the DE organization to"make the single performances intergrated into an unified and standardized one to maximize organizational efficiency"by a scientific and efficient system of human resources management (HRM).Many researchers have made efforts to probe into the HRM of DE in and abroad. The researches mainly involve the Macro-research on HRM, the study on capacity / quality of DE practitioners, the study on training and management of DE employees and the study on quality assessment of distance learning. However, there are still obvious problems in the domestic research achievements.Firstly, there is a lack of research with scientific research methods, especially the mthods of management science. Some strategies or mechanism of HRM put forward by educational technology researchers are based on experiences in stead of data or experiments. In fact, a lot of research achievements, methods or models in management science field can greatly help educational technology workers improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their researches.Secondly, the research on general practitioners of DE is insufficient. Currently, the studies on online teacher are abundant while the researches on distance manger or technical staff are seriously absent. But, as is known to all, these two kinds of workers are indispensable components of DE staff. Only after privding management strategies to improve their individual competency, can the level of HRM of DE be totally improved.Thirdly, the current research achievements can not fit the DE management reality very well because many researches discuss the training or evaluation of DE workers from the view of educational theory. However, HRM is a kind of management activity and it is more sentific to put forword management strategy, training program or evaluation methods from the viewpoint of management science.Finally, the research achievements failed to connect with each other effectively. These researches respectively focus on selection, training or assessment of DE practitioners and the conclusions are based on different theories or reality. The failure to provide macro-theoretical frameworks and systematic methods forces the manager to adapt to diverse ideas during his or her managent work.After the fully understanding of the research status, this thesis conducted an online questionnaire survey of 138 online teachers, 114 DE managers and 89 DE technology workers in order to analyse the domestic management status of DE. The survey covers three items: staff basic information, staff training situation and staff assessment situation.The statistical results of survey reveal five points. First, DE practitioners have strong training needs while current training plans are dissatisfied. Second, the contradiction between work and learning has became the most serious obstacle to upgrade professional skills.Third, the operating training contents and methods can not comprehensively enhance the skills of staff. Fourth, the deficiency of policy and the lack of funds are the important factors to weaken the training effect.Fifth, the unreasonable design of evaluation contents and methods are the main reasons for the unsatisfactory assessment results.Because of the above analysis, this thesis focuses on the HRM modle of the network education colleges in"Modern Distance Education Pilot Universities"and establishes the study on the competence theory, modern evaluation theory and DE management theory. HRM is a series of management activities, including human resources planning, staff recruitment and selection, training and development, performance management, pay administration, etc. Yet, the management mechanism and staff resource of the network education colleges are very complex. In order to make the study more universal, this thesis aims at the staff training and performance assessment, and build up HRM model of DE by constructing competency model, DE training system and assessment system.To construct competency model of DE staff is the all-important task of the research. Competency refers to any character that one person used to make successful performance in his work role. Competency model is the sum of competencies required by a particular work role. As a worker in network education colleges, one needs a competency system to successfully complete the required tasks. This thesis describes the competency system as three-leveled one, which includes general competency, working-sequence competency and professional-post competency. The"general competency"is the set of the basic competencies that every DE worker should have. The"working-sequence competency"refers to the competency congregation that the teacher staff, the management staff or the technology staff should possess. And the professional-post competencies are ones needed by a specific work post.The two domestic scholars, Li Shuang and Chen Li, brought forword the"Ability Model of Chinese DE Staff"to illuminate the abilities of DE workers. The thesis extracts the"general abilities"from the ability model, combines them with DE quality theory, DE economic theory, DE innovation theory and self-development theory, and finally advances the"general competency coding dictionary". Then, with Delphi method, it carries on a survey of 15 experts from 12 universities and identifies 16 generic competencies by calculating Crit-M, Standard Deviation, Coefficient of Variation, and Reliability Coefficient Alpha. Furthermore, it describes in detail the definition, the corresponding competencies and five behavior levels of each competency. The 16 generic competencies include: Respect for Others(RO), Understanding for Others(UO), Responsibility(RB), Actively Serving(AS), Vacation Awareness(VA), Technology Ability(TA), Information Literacy(IL), Problem Solving(PS), Organizing and Coordinating(CC), Pursuing Benefits(PB), Communication Ability(CA), Staff Cooperation(SC),Focusing on Effectiveness(FE), Creative Thinking(CT), Self Efficacy(SE) and Self Improvement(SI).To give a preliminary description of the working-sequence competency, the thesis established a corresponding relationship between the"special ability"of ability model with the work sequences of network education colleges, and completes an appropriate transformation. Then through integrating the main idea of flexible management, online teaching and technology integration into the preliminary description, it forms the"working-sequence competency coding dictionary". Next, the Behavioral Event Interview (BEI) of 18 online teachers, 16 DE manager and 16 DE technology workers is accomplished. From the description of the behavioral events the interviewer gave, the thesis extracts the corresponding competency according to the coding dictionary and calculates the frequency, grade points and total scores for each competency. The ones which can obviously differentiate the successful performances are confirmed as"working-sequence competency". The 8 competencies of teaching sequence are Teaching Ability(TA), Subject Literacy(SL), Communication Skills(CS), Media Presentation(MP), Course Design(CD), Instructional Evaluation(IE), Monitoring and Supporting(MS), Consultation and Recommendations(CR). The 8 determined competencies of management sequence include Planning and Organizing (PO), Budget and Control(BC), Evaluation and Decision(ED), Data Processing(DP), Target Monitoring(TM), Writing Skills(WS), Social Skills(SS), Resource Management(RM). And the competencies of technology sequence are 10, including Integration Conception(IC), Field Forecast(FF), Field Evaluation(FE), Standardized methods(SM), Development Skills(DS), Project Management(PM), Artistic Expression(AE), Material Making(MM), Engineering Skills(ES), Training Skills(TS).In order to determine the professional-post competency, the thesis makes further variation verification of frequency, grade points and total scores for each working-sequence competency. According to the definition of the competency, the ones which is displayed differently by the dissimilar posts of the same work sequence is defined as the"professional-post competency". After all the kinds of competency are confirmed, the three-leveled competency model of DE practitioners has been completely constructed.The fundamental guidance of the competency model for worker training system is reflected on the construction of competency target system. Because the competency is a kind of"idealized description"and its behavior standard has been described, the training target and traning content can be directly confirmed. The thesis divides the training content into two groups, basic module and professional module, and lists the knowledge points and their corresponding levels each module contains. The basic module covers the traning content corresponding to 16 general competencies, and the professional module tells the traning content of working-sequence competencies and professional-post competencies. Furthermore, to guide the management practices, the thesis gives three principles (competency target, human resource structure and training needs) to choose and combine training contents.Method is the key to a reasonable and effective training. With the perspective of career development, this thesis establishes a training method system, called OLP model, and puts forward three kinds of traning methods: Organization internal training (O), Licensed skills training (L) and Professional personnel training (P). It also expatiates on the main way of each kind of training method, and analyses the relationship between the OLP model with career development.With a variety of evaluation techniques and the diversified perspective, the assessment center observes the behavior of the practitioners and gives comprehensive assessment to forecast his working skills and development potential. In view of the observable and measurable characteristic of competency model, the thesis selects 10 competencies as the measurement indexes. The primary and secondary indexes are working skills (Problem Solving, Staff Cooperation and Communication Ability), vacation characters (Vacation Awareness and Information Literacy), and professional skills (teaching sequence includes: Teaching Ability, Instructional Evaluation, Course Design, Media Presentation, Monitoring and Supporting; management sequence includes: Planning and Organizing, Target Monitoring, Evaluation and Decision, Data Processing, Writing Skills; technology sequence includes: Integration Conception, Project Management, Field Evaluation, Standardized methods, Development Skills / Engineering Skills / Material Making). Simultaneously, the thesis conducts a questionnaire survey of 14 experts and ultimately identifies the weight of primary and secondary measurement index with"expert sorting method".The implementation of the assessment center is completed through a variety of situation drilling tools.The thesis chooses five kinds of tools (leaderless group discussion, in-basket test, management game, case analysis and structured interviews) and then illustrates the competency, the observation points and the score criteria each tool suit for. After all these, the assessment center of DE workers is totally completed.Eventually, the thesis expatiates on the advantage of the HRM model of DE and the shortage of sampling methods, results verification and conclusion applicability. Then, it points out the main directions and tasks of follow-up study.