CHPTER I. INTRODUCTION
This chapter presents six parts of sections, Research background, Problem statement, Purpose of this Study, Significance of this Study, Delimitation and Limitation, and Definition of Terms.
Research Background Importance of Training
Training plays an important role in business that human resource has been identified one main factor in business management; besides, business continuity is the long-run goal; organizations today face a constantly changing business environment.
Increasing global competition and advantage technology are creating an economy requiring organizations to build a flexible and highly skilled workforce (Long &
Smith, 2004). So keep the organization operates with strong competency and skilled is so important thing and that continuous development is the best strategy that many companies emphasize it as a front burner. Cultivating good employees, training them and educate them becomes the way of achieving this goal. That is the reason businesses view training activities as the point and put it in their schedule. Many literatures discuss and inspire Human Resource professionals a lot about the importance and the impact of training on the organizations. A main goal of HRD is to ensure that employees perform their jobs effectively. In addition to learning and retaining new material, employees must also use it on the job to improvement as a result of training (Desimone, Werner & Harris, 2001: 88). We may examine what training brings to business from researches regarding to the effect of training, and most researches show that effective training does positive influences on the organizations; though training is not the only way to change the conditions or solve
any problems business face, training could be one approach that gives the opportunity for them to lead to the better situations and the influence of training can’t be ignored.
Like the following description, “Training was described in terms of an open system in which it receives inputs from other parts of the organization and the external environment. The input is transformed by processes in effective training units into output that meets the organization’s need.” (Blanchard & Thacker, 2006: 22) In short, in business situations, people take training as a way to improve the situations that they are not satisfied with and view it as a method to meet their needs, so training has become the way of revolution, and even the way of change.
Transfer of Training Approaches
Years ago, most of the businesses use the traditional way in implementing their training, and it means they trained people in classroom because of the limitation of technology. By the invention and development of hi-tech, they use web-based training (WBT) as the tributary approach in these years and adopt WBT delivery as new approach in business.
Many organizations including business today use WBT as a way of training approach. Web-based training does bring lots of conveniences and it helps business go through the difficulties like distribution in far distance and the problem of timing limitations to learners. Web-based training (WBT), the delivery of instruction of learning content over the Internet or over a company’s Intranet, is becoming increasingly popular among America corporations (Chamers, Lee & Ely, 2004). And it is also used commonly in Taiwan and in other developed countries because of progressive technology. WBT provides flexible tools that across time and distance for organizations, and provides the opportunities to create competitions for their human resource development. From convenience and flexibility viewpoint, WBT does lots of
contribution to business. Although technology brings so many benefits to people, there are still some difficulties and limitations there when they are developing a training program based on WBT way.
Previous researches and the existing phenomenon in many places show that when developing training program, there’s the bottleneck coming about: they can’t implement the training program better and it seems that an obstacle is always right here they can’t across it; it means that the performance of the training program is so limited or they can’t promote the training affection, especially through the way of WBT when implementing the program and taking it as the main training method sometimes. The factors that cause this situation could be very complex and complicated, even though we can’t analyze them or point out what kinds of factors may lead to the particular problems today, all we can do just determine the special situations are caused by the somewhat factor; yet in this study, the researcher would like to explore and discuss one kind of the factors regarding for satisfying learner’s learning needs and on the other hand, we predict the results of the following WBT programs from previous ones. Were those programs motivating these learners to go for training programs in the future? And this question is what the researcher concerns.
Moreover, from the results of the study, we can tell the learners’ needs of WBT program in specific aspects as instructional design issue. Nowadays, this issue regarding learning motivation is not so emphasized till now, but learning motivations are quite important in WBT environment, though motivations are not easily or obviously observed, it’s a key success point for learning activities.
Besides determining those critical factors to learners’ learning motivations, the researcher got touch with this issue about these difficulties they met when developing
and implementing it. And some further discussion and suggestions regarding for relative researches will be provided.
Problem Statement
WBT is a trend of training that businesses adopt nowadays. Many companies try very hard to use this approach as an adjutant way to make training go through better.
However, Human Resource professionals in Taiwan come up with a bottleneck causes training effect can’t be promoted sometimes; and this phenomenon shows that there’s a problem that either training professionals are lacking of the knowledge or skills facilitating learners’ motivations, or the issue related to WBT should be designed more carefully.
In this study, the researcher has focused on the question of how instructional design influences on learners’ motivations and identified critical factors of instructional design affecting learners’ learning motivations in WBT.
Purpose of This Study
In this study, the researcher has discovered the situations of WBT in companies in Taiwan. The purposes of this study are as follows:
1. To find out what kinds of instructional design factors that affect learners in WBT;
2. To identify critical factors to promote the effects of WBT through in-depth interview technique to find out the developmental situations from these experts in WBT;
3. According to the conclusions of the analysis, the researcher makes some suggestions concerning on the development of WBT; in addition, to arouse the importance of this issue in business because companies view the returns from training as the first important thing when deciding to carry it out after all.
Significance of This Study
From the purposes of this study, the researcher would like to identify the critical factors of instructional design issue that affecting learners’ motivations of WBT;
besides, the factors that affecting acceptance and the motivations of the following WBT programs based on learners’ motivational dimensions that are attentions, relevance, confidences, and satisfactions (Keller, 1984) would be identified as well. In this way, we are able to ensure that instructional design plays an important role in the first step of WBT because WBT design would affect learners’ motivations, and also, attentions, relevance, confidences, satisfaction influence their learning motivations in the future.
Motivation is a fundamental element of learner analysis and is an integral part of the instructional design process for WBT (Lee, D. & Chamers, T., 2005). From the short statement, we can tell the relation between the two in WBT. As the critical factors that are identified, that instructional design should be considered more when developing WBT because of the influence on the final effect of training. Whether this results are rich or not, they help clear the doubt of the importance of learning motivation issue and how instructional design would affect the outcome of WBT, thus the outcome of this study may give Human Resources professionals hints of improving training effects in practical field in Taiwan especially.
Delimitations and Limitations The Delimitation of This Study
The adoption of synchronous WBT is not so general in business in Taiwan, so we talk about asynchronous WBT only in this study. The interviewees in WBT field and WBT instructional designers have engaged in WBT over than two years of their own industries. In this study, the researcher conducted the parts of WBT program design concerning with the part of motivating learners, and also conduct learners’
motivations with WBT courses. As for technical part like computer software and hardware of WBT design are not included in this study. In addition, the researcher has focused on instructional design aspect only in this study.
The Limitation of This Study
In this study, the researcher faced the limitation of subjects losing due to interviewees didn’t like to revealed the truth probably; to reduce this situation, the research was designed to have the interviews with these interviewees in different ways and questions , and of course, the cases they mentioned are the more, the better.
And the other limitation is that collecting professionals from all kinds of industries is difficult. To collect samples from all kinds of industries is necessary and important, but somehow, there are practical reasons make sample can’t be complete.
Thus, the researcher would like to have interviewed several representative companies in WBT developing.
Definition of Terms
In the study, the following terms are going to be defined; those terms are:
Web-based training, e-learning, instructional design; and motivation.
Web-based training (WBT)
WBT refers to the communication of information over the World Wide Web (WWW) with the intent of providing instruction (Kurtus, 1997). WBT allows learners who cannot have face-to-face training to attend classes in their homes or offices through the use of Internet or a company’s intranet (Henke, 1997; Levin, Levin&
Waddoups, 1999). In this study, the researcher is focusing on training situations in organizations through web, besides, the characteristics of WBT and e-learning are similar as the learners take the courses through media, and the environments for the learners are the same; the researcher takes this part to further discuss.
E-learning
The delivery of training and performance support directly to employees' desktops--is exploding in growth and complexity (ASTD, 2002). E-Learning outlines how to develop an organization-wide learning strategy based on cutting-edge technologies and explains the dramatic strategic, organizational, and technology issues involved in corporate learning (Marc, 2002). E-learning includes self-oriented learning activity and also training activity, but self-oriented learning activity is not discussed in this study.
Instructional design
Instructional design refers to a systematic decision-making process that allows educators to identify the most important elements of the learning process and to make
decisions about what will be the most effective way to plan and implement a learning activity. It has typically been used in technical training and school systems, but broader applications for instructional design can be employed in a great many areas of adult education (Dean, 2002).
Motivation
Motivation is typically defined as the forces that account for the arousal, selection, direction, and continuation of behavior (Biehler & Snowman, 1997). In this study, the researcher mentions about learners’ motivation especially because the participants are all adults, and according to ARCS model (attention, relevance, confidence and satisfaction) that reveals motivation is formed by attention, relevance, confidence and satisfaction. This research is going to focus on learners’ learning motivation to match the key point of this study.
Critical factor
Critical factor means the main and key reasons cause the specific situations or the phenomenon; there are many factors impact on the specific situation, yet the main and specific factors to motivating learners to take WBT courses are what this study focuses on.
