My name is Christian S. Loh, Ph.D. I am Professor of Instructional Design & Technology at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL., and a researcher who is highly interested in performance assessment and improvement of training and learning using serious games and other virtual environments. (To those who reckon there is a difference between training and learning: I lean more towards training.)
My research investigates how people make decisions and problem-solve in serious games. I began by gathering players’ in-game (user-generated) behavioral data and analyzed their problem-solving strategy performance (metacognition) in situ virtual environments (e.g., serious games) using a process known as Serious Games Analytics (Loh, Sheng & Ifenthaler, 2015).
I have developed an assessment framework for the assessment with serious games called, Information Trails. The framework was first published in a book edited by David Gibson (2006). I received a provisional patent for the framework in July 2007. I was awarded the prestigious Defense University Research Instrumentation Program (DURIP) grant (U.S. Army Research Office, 2009) to create the Virtual Environment Lab (V-Lab). In Sep 2012, we established the appropriate statistical process to convert Information Trails into Serious Games Analytics. Then in 2016, I started looking into expanding the virtual environment to include virtual reality, which changed the lab into Virtual Environment & Reality Lab (still named, V-Lab).
Among these pages, you can find more information about my publications, my edited book, my research projects, the Virtual Environment Lab, the games we made, the Information Trails performance assessment framework, and the visualization tool developed by my research team and I. And yes, without a dedicated team of (current and past) student researchers at the V-LAB, many of the projects will simply not be possible. So Kudos, team!
Here’s a shout-out to all who had contributed professionally at the V-Lab (in chronological order):
- I-Hung Li (Instructional Technology/Software Engineering) — private sector
- Ting Zhou (Instructional Technology) — private sector.
- JaeHwan Byun (Instructional Technology) — Professor at Wichita State.
- Aaron Ekstrand (Software Engineering) — graduated in 2016 (M.Eng.), private sector.
- Joe Lenox (Computer Science) — graduated in 2016 (Ph.D.)
- Arnond Anantachai (Computer Science) — graduated in 2010 (M.S.), private sector.
