About Me

Jaehwan Byun comes from South Korea where he earned his BS and MA degrees in Educational Technology. Those degrees allowed him not only to work as an instructional designer in a human resource development institute, but also to pursue a carrier as an instructional design and technology specialist. After he earned his MA degree in South Korea, he moved to US and started his doctoral program. Since he entered Southern Illinois University Carbondale, he has been studying the potential of digital games for education and the ways to engage learners in multimedia educational environment, such as e-learning.

His career goal established through his long experiences accumulated practically and academically in the field is to answer the question; "how can we, as instructional design and technology (IDT) specialists, design learning environments that can provide students with a learning opportunity as an aesthetic experience by using various technologies?" The question guides his research interests around five themes:

1) Aesthetics in Instructional design,
2) Emerging various e-Learning technology
3) Learner engagement,
4) Digital game-based learning, and
5) Art-based learning.

At the moment, he is working on his Ph.D. dissertation. The topic of his dissertation is to examine the effect of sensory stimulus on learner engagement in playing an instructional digital game.

In the future, Byun wishes to contribute to the field, instructional design and technology, as a researcher or an instructional design and technology specialist in North America area.