The Distance Ecological Model to support self/collaborative-learning in the Internet environment

With the rapid development of information technology, it is widely accepted that computer and information communication literacy has become extremely important, and is the main new ability required from teachers everywhere. Therefore, for enhancing their teaching skills and information literacy about the Internet environment with multimedia, a new teachers' education framework is necessary. The purpose of the study, is to propose and develop a distance educational system, RAPSODY, which is a school-based curriculum development and training system. In this environment, a teacher can learn subject contents, teaching ways, and evaluation methods of the students' learning activities, related to the new subject called "Information", via an Internet based self-training system. The authors describe the structure, function and mechanism of the distance educational system based on the Distance Ecological Model, in order to realize the above-mentioned goal, and then describe the educational meaning of this model in consideration of the new learning ecology, which is based on multi-modality and new learning situations and forms.