This is the homepage of Weichao "Vera" Chen, Ph.D. Dr. Chen is the Assistant Director, Technology-Enhanced Surgical Education and Distance Education at the American College of Surgeons, Division of Education.
Dr. Chen is an experienced faculty developer, researcher, and practitioner, and a leader within the field of Learning, Design, and Technology. Her broad professional interests include
Educational application of emerging technologies (e.g., concept maps, Weblogs, artificial intelligence, VoiceThread, Edutainment, mobile and online learning, Computer Assisted Language Learning/CALL).
Medical and health professions education, faculty development.
Learning sciences, motivation, autonomy, self-regulated learning, professional well-beings.
Design-Based Research/Educational Design Research, curriculum development, instructional design, evidence-based medical education, change management.
Program evaluation, learning assessment, feedback, usability, learning analytics.
Knowledge construction and convergence, Team-based Learning, Problem-based Learning, Community of Practice, Interdisciplinary collaboration, Intercultural academic communication/adaptation.
Research Experiences: Since 2004, Dr. Chen has led and participated in studies introducing educational innovations to enhance the learning experience of diverse learners. Dr. Chen has been focusing on healthcare professions education in 2011 and has successfully collaborated with faculty to obtain over $160,000 in grant awards to fund educational innovation efforts. Her work to date has resulted in over 35 journal publications and 45 conference presentations and workshops and book chapters, and she first/senior authored over half of the journal publications.
University Teaching and Faculty Development: Since Aug 2012, Dr. Chen has developed and taught professional development workshops conducting educational research article critiques and teaching course design principles, learning assessment, and the use of technologies in teaching, research, and daily office work. Individual consultations were also provided to faculty on areas including teaching and educational research. Dr. Chen has had experience teaching both online, hybrid, and face-to-face post-secondary courses. While at the University of Virginia, she was one of the course leaders of “Medical Education: Learning Community Teaching Elective,” offered since 2017 to guide 140 senior medical students towards becoming successful medical educators.
Program Evaluation: Dr. Chen has led and participated in various program evaluation projects since 2008, including evaluation of medical education curriculum and faculty development programs and usability evaluation of online systems. Many of these projects have led to successful publications. She is particularly interested in introducing faculty to Educational Design Research/Design-Based Research approach in order to guide their incorporation of research activities into the iterative development and improvement of educational innovations.
Professional Services: Since 2010, Dr. Chen has been invited and reviewed over 100 journal and conference submissions. Most recently, Dr. Chen has served as a sub-conference executive chair/co-chair for the International Conference on Computers in Education 2018-2021, the flagship conference of Asia-Pacific Society for Computers in Education and a sub-conference executive chair/co-chair for Global Chinese Conference on Computers in Education 2020-2024. She was the past chair for Faculty Development in Medical Education Special Interest Group for Association of American Medical Colleges’ Southern Group on Educational Affairs.
If you would like to connect with her, feel free to click on "Contact Me" to send her a message.