Meet Dr. Jiyoon Jung, Winner of VSU’s 2024 Presidential Excellence Award for The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

Dr. Richard A. Carvajal, president of Valdosta State University, recently honored Dr. Jiyoon Jung with the 2024 Presidential Excellence Award for The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. She joined the James L. and Dorothy H. Dewar College of Education and Human Services faculty in 2020 and currently serves as an associate professor in the Department of Leadership, Technology, and Workforce Development and as the coordinator of the Master of Education in Instructional Technology program.

VALDOSTA — Dr. Richard A. Carvajal, president of Valdosta State University, recently honored Dr. Jiyoon Jung with the 2024 Presidential Excellence Award for The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.

The Presidential Excellence Award for The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning recognizes a faculty member who produces innovative scholarly work on the science of teaching and learning and regularly contributes new knowledge on the subject.

Jung joined the faculty of VSU’s James L. and Dorothy H. Dewar College of Education and Human Services in 2020 and currently serves as an associate professor in the Department of Leadership, Technology, and Workforce Development and as the coordinator of the Master of Education in Instructional Technology program.

VSU: What are your favorite classes to teach and your favorite topics to research?

Jung: I have taught over 13 different courses so far, except for the dissertation courses. These courses span across different domains, including instructional design and technology, multimedia development, educational data, research and evaluation, and internship/portfolio. My favorite course to teach changes every time depending on the students I get for each semester. I think the interaction between them and myself is what matters to me the most. Content-wise, I do like most of what I teach.

VSU: Why do you believe it is important for teachers to do the work necessary to keep their class content interesting and relevant to new generations of students?

Jung: If the class content is not interesting and relevant to new generations of students, they won’t be interested, and learning will not transfer. In fully online professional learning programs such as mine — I teach only graduate students — it is critical to present materials that can be meaningful to their workplace. Otherwise, they would not engage. This is time and effort wasted for both students and me.

VSU: What strategies / tools / techniques have proven most effective in increasing student learning in your classroom?

Jung: Recently, I have been increasing the portion of synchronous meetings in my courses, which have been mostly asynchronous. This enhances both social and teaching presences in the fully online courses I teach and helps build a sense of community. When I do synchronous meetings, it is important that students have a shared view on the topics I am discussing and an explicit way for participation and contribution. So, I like to use screensharing and cold calling as strategies to enhance learning during my Teams meetings. I also like to organize my semester so that students lead the meeting with presentations based on their projects.

VSU: What drives your research / scholarly work in the field of teaching and learning?

Jung: My motivation has always been finding ways that work for my students — and myself — and testing my theoretical knowledge about teaching and learning along the way. I was trained to think like a researcher before I started teaching full time in higher education. My research focuses on authentic learning design, so applying what I read from research in my classroom was a natural step. However, I soon faced challenges of implementing authentic learning designs, as I did not have a good understanding of my students. I relied on my students’ feedback (through Student Opinion of Instruction surveys) to revise course designs. At the same time, I tried to read up on teaching strategies that leverage students’ existing knowledge. These opened a new set of research opportunities for me. So, I think it is safe to say that while my research drives my teaching, my teaching also drives my research in teaching and learning.

VSU: What advice do you have for other faculty who wish to identify more effective ways to stimulate engagement and comprehension in their own classroom?

Jung: I was involved in a Scholarship of Teaching and Learning community when I was a doctoral student at Indiana University. My motivation was to learn about how teaching professionals outside of education think about teaching. I was fascinated with how experts in other content areas strive to teach their students — the challenges they experience and strategies they come up with to overcome. This led me to investigate how instructors teach with a particular instructional method (i.e., case-based instruction) within their disciplinary classrooms in professional education. It was eye-opening to systematically compare how one approach to teaching can be differently interpreted and used to align to the instructional cultures and expectations across academic disciplines. Based on this research, I recommend having a well-defined teaching philosophy or instructor identity and engaging in cross-disciplinary conversations about how others with a similar philosophy teach. It is a powerful way to stay reflective as an instructor, and this reflectiveness coupled with continuous attention to student data will help one to identify more effective ways to stimulate engagement and comprehension in one’s classrooms.

As the winner of the Presidential Excellence Award for The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Jung received a framed certificate and a $1,000 cash prize.