Dr. Annie Dell’Aria, Assistant Professor of Art History, has been selected as the recipient of the 2020 Miami University Affordable Education Leader Award.
The award is given to a nominated Miami faculty member, on any campus, who demonstrates a compelling and significant impact in areas related to affordable and open educational resources. The goal of this award is to inspire educators to help make education affordable.

Dr. Dell'Aria was nominated for this award by Rob Robbins, Professor of Art and Chair of the Art Department at Miami University, and selected as the recipient for 2020 by the Open Educational Resources/Affordability Committee and the Associated Student Government.

As part of the OER Create grant program, Dr. Dell'Aria built a website that serves as a complete learning resource for the students enrolled in her History of Art and Renaissance to Modern courses. Chair Robbins notes that "the website is quite innovative for the subject in its multivalent approach to the content of the course through its multi-media approach to content delivery" and that "by presenting the information as a topical array of resources students have a much greater likelihood of developing their own conclusions, rather than adopting the conventional interpretations applied to well-known works of art."

 Dr. Dell'Aria has been using the website for course instruction since the fall of 2017 now and each semester she has refined the content based upon student feedback. This freely accessible website replaced a $200 textbook that had been used for course instruction, resulting in approximately $176,000 in cost savings for students in the past three years. Dr. Elizabeth Mullenix, Dean of the College of Creative Arts, commented that "Professors like Annie Dell'Aria are why Miami consistently ranks so highly in awards for college teaching. Dr. Dell'Aria is not only a skilled and knowledgeable teacher, but she is a compassionate teacher; she cares about her students and is sensitive to their needs, and this thoughtfulness fueled her innovation."
 
The impact of Dr. Dell'Aria's work is not limited to the Miami University Campus community. This website is freely accessible to anyone in the world, providing scholars at other academic institutions and autodidacts the opportunity to expand their knowledge in this area.

Written by Carla Myers, Coordinator of Scholarly Communications for Miami University.