A paper coauthored by Assistant Professor Yun Huang and PhD student Si Chen received an Honorable Mention Award at the 23rd ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2020), which was held virtually on October 17-21. Approximately 1,000 papers were eligible for consideration for Best Paper awards, with the top one percent recognized as Best Papers and five percent as Honorable Mentions. Coauthors included Xinyue Chen, an undergraduate at Peking University, and Xu Wang, a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University.
In their paper, "I Was Afraid, but Now I Enjoy Being a Streamer!: Understanding the Challenges and Prospects of Using Live Video Streaming for Online Education,” the researchers examine how Chinese teachers and students addressed challenges transitioning from face-to-face to online learning because of COVID-19. Their study showed that "challenges such as real-time interaction and engagement, technical uncertainty, ethical issues such as privacy and copyright, and impression management remain severe" in Live Video Streaming (LVS)-based online teaching.
"After I started teaching online in March, I found that I, as a teacher, related to many of the findings," Huang said. "Some of the findings are not that intuitive without real experiences, especially how using social media features of LVS-based apps can promote the teacher-student relationship."
Huang's research areas include social computing, human-computer interaction, mobile computing, and crowdsourcing. Before joining Illinois, she was a faculty member in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University and a postdoc fellow at Carnegie Mellon University. She received her PhD from the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. She earned her bachelor's degree from the Department of Computer Science and Technology at Tsinghua University, in Beijing, China.
Chen's research interests include designing and examining computing systems for social good, specifically in supporting informal learning under different contexts. She received her BS in engineering from Tsinghua University.