Data Model Building for Online Teachers' Professional Development

Online Teachers' Professional Development (TPD) has become an important way to enhance their professional capacity. However, it is difficult to evaluate teachers' performances in online TPD. Due to the complexity of online activities for teachers, there is no single standard to evaluate performance. However, online professional development platforms accumulate detailed data about teachers' online behavior, and this provides an important opportunity to find a solution to the problem of evaluation. In this paper, we suggest a model-building process to build a data model for online TPD. We describe the structure and process of building a teacher model for Ourteachers, one of the largest Online TPD platforms in China. Important issues critical to the model-building methodology are also discussed in this paper.