Yi-Chun (Shelly) Hong is an assistant professor in the division of educational leadership and innovation and primarily teaches the master of educational technology program. She received her doctorate in learning, design, and technology from the University of Georgia. Professor Hong’s diverse professional experience includes instructional design, textbook development, and teaching English as a foreign language. She has been working in various contexts, including higher education, K-12, and industry settings. Hong’s research interests lie in two areas. Her first research line focuses on designing effective and meaningful online collaborative learning environments. She specifically considers the elements that facilitate and support students’ promotive interactions to understand the interaction patterns among students and between the instructors and students in online collaborative learning activities. Professor Hong has been collaborating with colleagues from the fields of bilingual education and statistics to improve students’ online collaborative learning experience.
Her second research area seeks to support students’ development of ill-structured problem-solving abilities. She has developed and studied case-based e-learning environments to help students acquire design problem solving, ethical problem solving, and decision-making problem-solving skills by collaborating with scholars from medical education, teacher training programs, and engineering education on several interdisciplinary research projects. She also has been investigating the role of reflective thinking during design problem-solving process in the context of engineering design and instructional design. Professor Hong has published in various outlets including Educational Technology Research and Development, British Journal of Educational Technology, and Tech Trends.
Education
Ph.D. Learning, Design, and Technology, University of Georgia
M.Ed. Instructional Technology, University of Georgia
B.S. Applied Foreign Language, National Yunlin University of Science and Technology, Taiwan
Guiding Research Question 1: How do student designers reflective behaviors evolved over the course of an open-ended engineering design project?
This project centers on design problem solving in the engineering context. They are in the process of using thematic analysis to analyze engineering students’ reflection journals to surface how their reflective patterns evolved during the process of working on an open-ended engineering design project.
Guiding Research Question 2: How do statistics students interact with their peers in an online collaborative learning activity to assist their acquisition of statistics knowledge and skills?
This interdisciplinary research project investigates students’ interaction patterns in online collaborative learning activities in graduate-level statistics courses. They are using a mixed method approach to uncover students’ general perceptions toward collaborative online activities and to understand how they interact and communicate with each other during their collaboration.
Publications
Hong, Y.-C., & Choi, I. (2011). Three dimensions of reflective thinking in solving design problems: A conceptual model. Educational Technology Research & Development, 59(5), 687-710.
Choi, I., Hong, Y.-C., Park, H., & Lee, Y. (2013). Case-based learning for Anesthesiology: Enhancing dynamic decision-making skills through cognitive apprenticeship and cognitive flexibility. In R. Luckin, S. Puntambekar, P. Goodyear, B. L. Grabowski, J. Underwood, & N. Winters (Eds.), Handbook of Design in Educational Technology. New York: Routledge.
Hong, Y.-C., & Choi, I. (2015). Assessing reflective thinking in solving design problems: The development of a questionnaire. British Journal of Educational Technology, 46(4), 848-863.
Kleinsasser, R., & Hong, Y.-C. (2016). Online group work design: Processes, complexities, and intricacies. TechTrends, 60(6), 569-576.
Kleinasser, R. C., & Hong, Y.-C. (2017). Graduate students’ antecedents to meaningful and constructive discussions: Developing potential collaborative online interactions. Journal of Formative Design in Learning, 1(2), 84-98.
