Titles

• Assistant Professor, Department of Engineering, College of Technology and Innovation

Biography

Odesma is an engineering education scholar. As such, her professional pursuits are focused on re-imagining engineering through education based on a scholarly understanding of the changing nature of the engineering profession, and how people learn to become practitioners. This mission is partially actualized through her research which seeks to identify, develop and evaluate tools and techniques that can be readily applied in real learning environments to improve student learning, and teaching.  Much of her work has been done using design-based research methodology, i.e., a framework that allows researchers to simultaneously pursue the goals of developing effective learning environments and using such environments as naturalistic laboratories to study learning and teaching. She has pursued two main lines of research: The first looks at artefact-inspired discovery–based pedagogy, i.e., learning activities where students’ exploration of STEM knowledge is self-directed and motivated by interactions or manipulations of artefacts. The second looks at the development of faculty expertise in outcomes-based course design through the use of the Instructional Module Development (imod) system, a self-guided web-based training tool.

Education

• PhD, Engineering Education, Purdue University, 2009
• ME, Industrial, Manufacturing, and Information Engineering, Morgan State University, 2005
• BS, Electrical and Computing Engineering, Morgan State University, 2003