Dr. Sanghoon Park, associate professor of Instructional Technology at University of South Florida (USF), currently teaches graduate courses including Current trends of Instructional Technology, Interactive Media, and Motivational Design in Learning Technology. Dr. Park’s research agenda involves utilizing effective instructional design approaches and emerging technologies to provide optimal learning experiences in diverse learning settings. His research has focused on designing motivational interventions for online learners and exploring the effectiveness and educational implications of immersive emerging technologies for learning experience design (i. e. pedagogical agent, augmented reality, and virtual simulation).
Dr. Park has received numerous awards, including the 2023 Innovation in Online Design and Teaching Award, the Young Researcher Award, Best Article Awards, the Best Practice Award, and the Crystal Award from professional associations such as American Educational Research Association (AERA) and Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT). Dr. Park is serving as a coordinator for USF’s new Master of Science (M.S.) program in Learning Design and Technology. He has been also serving as a major professor/chair/committee member for more than 90 doctoral students and more than 180 masters/specialist students.
Session Description
“Preservice Teachers’ Emotional Experiences in a Virtual Teaching Simulation: Analysis of Facial Expression Recognition“
This study investigated preservice teachers’ emotional experiences while interacting within a virtual scenario-based teacher-training system called Simulation for Teaching Enhancement of Authentic Classroom beHavior Emulator (SimTEACHER). Three research questions were (1) What are the effects of the type of interactions designed within SimTEACHER on preservice teachers’ key performance indicators (KPIs)? (2) What are the effects of the type of interactions designed within SimTEACHER on preservice teachers’ emotional valence? (3) What are the effects of the type of interactions designed within SimTEACHER on pre-service teachers’ key emotions? We created three types of interactions (no interaction, unexpected interaction, and expected interaction) within SimTEACHER and examined the influences of the interaction design on preservice teachers’ emotional responses in three aspects: key performance indicators (attention, emotional engagement, and sentiment), emotional valence (positive, neutral, and negative), and four basic emotions (joy, sadness, fear, and anger). Fourteen preservice teachers from a 4-year public university in southwestern South Korea participated in this study. The data of the participants’ emotional expressions were collected using the Emotient software, which has been widely used for automated facial expression recognition and analysis. A series of one-way repeated-measured Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) indicated that participants experienced higher positive and neutral emotions, higher emotional engagement, and a higher feeling of joy when they engaged in unexpected interactions than when they engaged in expected interactions or no interactions.