Member Profile: Susan Dean

Username: sdean

Contact: deansusan@deanza.edu

Home page: http://faculty.deanza.edu/deansusan/

Author of: 208 Modules and 2 Courses (view statistics)

Coauthors: Dr. Barbara Illowsky

Biography:

Susan Dean was a full-time Mathematics and Statistics Instructor at De Anza College in Santa Clara County until June 2007 when she retired. Currently, Susan does consulting and volunteer tutoring in mathematics. She has received a number of awards including the “Teaching Excellence Award” in 2005 from the California Mathematics Council, Community Colleges.

Susan earned her B. A. in Mathematics and her Life Teaching Credential at University of California, Santa Barbara. She studied Computer Science at Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York and then earned her M. S. degree in Applied Mathematics at Santa Clara University.

Before joining the mathematics faculty at De Anza College, Susan taught high school mathematics at La Canada High School in Southern California and worked as a computer engineer for both Honeywell in Massachusetts and Hewlett-Packard in California.

At De Anza College, Susan taught all levels of Mathematics. In the two years before she retired, she headed a program in Developmental Mathematics using the software EnableMath (developed by Enablearning in Cambridge, Massachusetts). The Developmental Mathematics program has helped and continues to help especially at-risk students succeed in Developmental Mathematics.

Susan co-developed, with Barbara Illowsky, one of the college’s first online learning courses, Elementary Statistics, which won the “Best Online Teaching Award” in 2002 from the California Virtual Campus, a California Community College System consortium. Susan did the programming for the course in WebCT and then transferred it to Catalyst, a form of Moodle. Susan and Barbara co-authored Collaborative Statistics, an elementary statistics textbook with a collaborative learning and multicultural approach. Susan has spoken at numerous conferences about technology in the mathematics classroom and lab, online learning in statistics, and collaborative learning.