Yi-Chun Hong

Yi-Chun (Shelly) Hong’s professional experience spans instructional design, textbook development, and teaching English as a foreign language, across a range of contexts including higher education, K–12, and industry settings.

Hong’s research interests center on two main areas. The first focuses on designing effective and meaningful online collaborative learning environments. She examines the elements that facilitate and support students’ promotive interactions and studies the interaction patterns that occur among students as well as between instructors and students in online collaborative learning activities. She collaborates with colleagues in bilingual education and statistics to enhance students’ online collaborative learning experiences.

Her second research area involves supporting students in developing their abilities to solve ill-structured problems. She has created and investigated case-based e-learning environments aimed at helping students acquire design problem-solving, ethical problem-solving, and decision-making skills. This work includes interdisciplinary collaborations with scholars in medical education, teacher preparation programs, and engineering education. She also studies the role of reflective thinking during design problem solving in the contexts of engineering design and instructional design.