Through my teaching, I want my students to acquire intellectual knowledge of instructional technology but more importantly to apply critical thinking and creativity to address the issues and challenges of using technology to promote learning. I expect students not only to solve the problems I give them but to be able to discover and explore new problems which are not known yet. Also I hope students will not only meet existing professional needs but will also pioneer new jobs in related fields.
Instructional technology is a field that requires both the practical expertise of field experience and the scholarly insight of academia. My students will have diverse experiences of instructional design, development, and evaluation from implementing their ideas in and out of the classroom. Students will nurture communication and leadership skills, critical abilities for an instructional designer, in order to coordinate communications and collaboration between subject matter experts and media developers. Additionally, students will review and discuss every facet of their practice to be able to have insights penetrating reality of the Instructional Technology field. I am going to achieve these goals through five channels as follows; 1) instilling eagerness, 2) process than product, 3) inquiry-based methodology, 4) peer review, and 5) international collaboration.
Instilling eagerness
I would like to introduce a part of the Prologue of my first book, Instructional Strategies for Blended e-Learning to Upgrade My Teaching (2008), which was written to promote quality teaching using e-technology, based on my experience of faculty development and faculty teaching consulting for several years while I served as assistant research professor at the Center for Teaching and Learning, Seoul National University (SNU).
… The most important differences between a good teacher and a poor teacher are interest and eagerness. A good teacher is interested in good teaching and is eager to teach excellently. He or she prepares a course, reflects on how to improve his or her teaching, and seeks input from colleagues. He or she gives teaching a high priority in his or her life. In contrast, a poor teacher demonstrates little interest in good teaching. He or she believes that failure to learn is the responsibility of the student. Eagerness to teach well is a primary requirement for good teaching. …
I believe eagerness for good teaching is the first qualification for achieving intended learning goals. My teaching will project from my own passion and eagerness, which I believe will be highly contagious to the students.
Process than product
In invited speeches at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (January 2010) and Hokkaido University in Japan (July 2010), I presented Curriculum Innovation in a Top Research University: Should we teach 'product' or 'process'? The presentation indicated shortcomings of current university curricula in addressing some core competencies such as critical thinking ability, creativity, leadership, and sociability, including communication and interpersonal skills. I stressed that it is because we teach the “product” of knowledge, rather than the “process” of getting knowledge, that these core competencies were not being acquired. The product-based paradigm has engendered discipline-based curricula, which are mostly about promoting learning through the delivery of a knowledge product. The process-based paradigm, on the other hand, engenders issue (and problem)-based curricula, which are more about ‘‘how to think” rather than ‘‘what to think.” An issue-based curriculum focuses on field issues which exist in reality and which can only be solved, not by a specific discipline, but by comprehensive convergence of various disciplines as well as other social competencies. Instead of a certain knowledge requirement, what is critical is what kind of approaches are used to solve problems, and this is coming from process to reach the knowledge, not from the delivery of knowledge product. Therefore I will design my courses based on this process-based paradigm.
Inquiry-based methodology
Reflecting the eagerness mentioned in the prologue of my book, I developed an inquiry-based learning model for my graduate courses. Students prepared at least two questions before every class, not simple questions, but rather profound inquiries that required thorough reflection and review of reading materials. Each class usually started with the questions, sometimes specifically selected to be shared with other students. The quality of the questions, rather than the accuracy of the answers, served as the basis of evaluation. From the iterative generation of questions and discussions, students’ ideas are nurtured and developed, and I hope students will find enlightenment through this process.
Peer review
According to my research article, What do students find important in peer evaluation? (2012), students evaluate their peers based on contributions that an instructor could not easily observe during a class. Thus student peer evaluations constitute a useful and complementary strategy for instructors in assessing students’ competencies such as sociability beyond individual learning competencies. Therefore, I will actively encourage and facilitate a peer review system in my courses so that students can review and comment on their peers’ work constructively and share the process of knowledge-building.
International collaboration
Based on my many years of teaching at Seoul National University, I can arrange the co-teaching of courses or collaborative online projects between universities. International collaboration activities will be a challenging and meaningful experience for students to understand alternative cultural perspectives and approaches in the same field so that students can better envision the global context.
As a result of the instructional design and teaching strategies described above, I expect that my students will produce work of publishable quality, whether that work be in the form of an academic paper or a practical development. I plan to continue to facilitate students’ work during and after the course so that students can ultimately publish their papers in refereed journals. When the final project is not a paper but a practical development, I also require the quality of the final product to be publishable on a public-facing website so that the development can be accumulated into the student’s portfolio. These high expectations will ensure that students can start their career with professional expertise as either a scholar or a practitioner immediately after graduation. During a course, I am not only teaching students but also learning myself. Exploring the field together with students makes me feel alive and excited for the future.
My Teaching Experience
Seoul National University (Dept. of Education) 2001 ~ 2012
Instructional Design Seminar (Doctoral course)
Distance Education Seminar (English only, Doctoral course)
Educational Method and Educational Technology(Undergraduate)
Educational Technology (Undergraduate)
Computer Mediated Communication (Graduate)
Instructional Needs analysis & Task analysis (Graduate)
Instructional Design Method (Graduate)
Theory and Practice in Educational Technology (Undergraduate)
Korea University (Dept. of Computer Education) 2000 ~ 2004
Web-Based Educational System (Undergraduate)
Computer Science Education (Undergraduate & Graduate)
Computer Science Material Research and Teaching Method (UG)
Computer-Assisted Instruction (Undergraduate)
Distance Education (Undergraduate & Graduate)
Korea Digital University (Dept. of Distance Education) 2001 ~ 2003
Theory and Practice in Distance Education (fully online)