Professor
Degrees with fields, institutions and dates
Years of service on this faculty, including date of original appointment and dates of advancement in rank.
Other related experience-teaching, industrial
Current Research Interests
Engineering Education/ Educational Research
Anna Dollár co-authored with Paul S. Steif (CMU) a web-based, interactive Engineering Statics course: http://oli.web.cmu.edu/openlearning/forstudents/freecourses/engineering-statics . The course has been developed as part of the Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative (OLI) and is available to individual learners and institutions free of charge. It draws upon the authors’ work to reorganize Statics instruction to better address the conceptual challenges students face. Elements of the course also benefit from studies of conceptual knowledge in Statics and the development and psychometric analysis of the Statics Concept Inventory.
The course consists of twenty modules. Each module is based on a set of carefully articulated learning objectives and contains expository text and various interactive exercises, including about 300 tutors with hints and feedback. Assessment is tightly integrated within each module, with students confronting frequently interspersed formative “Learn by Doing” activities, and summative “Did I Get This” interactive assessments at the end of each section to signal if learning objectives were met.
Since June 2006, the Open and Free version of the course has had over 45,000 anonymous visitors. Over 6,500 named users have registered for the Open and Free version during the same time period. Since May 2007 the academic version of the course has been used in blended mode by over 2,600 students in 84 course sections at over 35 institutions. In 2011, the academic course was used by 848 students from 18 institutions.
Interactive portions of the web-based materials are instrumented to record student answers, and provide the results in readily accessible aggregated form in a Learning Dashboard. Thus, before class, instructors can utilize that information to identify student difficulties, and then focus classroom activities on specific concept and skills that need elaboration and reinforcement. Students’ usage of the course is analyzed by educational data mining techniques. Learning gains are quantified with the diagnostic tests. Overall usage of the course materials by students, as well as detailed patterns of use of interactive elements, is analyzed. Finally, correlation between the usage frequency, students’ self regulation of learning and performance is studied.
This work is supported by William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and by the National Science Foundation.
Principal publications
Journal Articles
Selected Conference Proceedings
Scientific and Professional societies of which a member
Honors and awards.
Ohio Magazine Excellence in Education recognition December 2011
ASEE North Central Section Outstanding Teacher Award, 2011
Invited Speaker
Active/Self-directed Learning, National Academy of Engineering (NAE) Frontiers of Engineering Education workshop, November 2011
Systematic Formative Assessment, Main plenary session at the American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE) Annual Conference & Exposition, Vancouver, BC, June 2011 (about 2500 attendees)
University System of Ohio Faculty Innovator Award, 2011
Institutional and Professional Service
Miami University (these are some selected examples)
National