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.