Bio

Jongbok Byun is an associate professor at Ashford University in San Diego and the chief data scientist at YAP Company in Korea. He studied management information systems and specialized in telecommunications and networking. Jongbok earned his doctoral degree from Claremont Graduate University in California. He worked for Korea Telecom as a business researcher for several years before he started his doctoral degree. His primary research interests are online learning management systems, artificial intelligence, neural networks, machine learning and big data. He lives in Korea temporarily at this time.

Project: In Search of Excellence: Understanding Online Classroom Dynamics

In the US, online education and classrooms are gaining momentum rapidly. There are MOOC platforms such as Coursera, edX and Udacity, which collect massive audiences. Many prestigious schools, such as MIT, Harvard, Stanford and UC Berkeley support the online modalities in their traditional classrooms. Tens of thousands of students are participating in these online classes. However, online education doesn’t have the impressive results people expected; the average completion rate of Harvard courses in edX is six percent.

In this study, I would like to explore the relationship between the online presence of teachers and students. The presence of people in classrooms and their interactions might create interesting points to consider for online education. Hypothetically, more attentive students might have better interactions and grades. Since they might have better feelings or relationships with others in the classroom, they could engage more with the course materials and lectures. I hope to find any meaningful associations and causal relationships between various datasets of the online classes to analyze.