Access, Participation and Success

This report explores the broader impact of COVID-19 on the learning experiences and academic performance of ethnic minority students, using Open University (OU) Level 1 Computing modules as a case study.

Project context

Highly Commended - eSTEeM Scholarship Projects of the Year Awards 2024.

Winner - Best Poster Competition, 12th eSTEeM Annual Conference 2023.

S390 is the undergraduate science capstone project module.

The importance of personal, non-academic support of students especially in a distance learning environment is well documented in the literature.

Winner - eSTEeM Scholarship Projects of the Year Awards 2025.

When M269 (Algorithms, data structures and computability) was rewritten in 2021, all learning, practical work and assessment content was presented by means of Jupyter notebooks rather than having a mixture of theory on the VLE, two printed textbooks and practical work using an IDE.

The Disability Champion project was a pilot programme to support ALs in their teaching of students in design with disability flags given that the proportion of students within this group has been steadily rising over recent years.

Decolonising the curriculum (DTC) is a university-wide initiative within the broader decolonising the university (DTU) project overseen by the EDI Dean with mandate from the VC. The current focus of DTC work in the STEM faculty is on Level 1 modules in all schools.

The aim of this project was to look at processes and experiences that were either a barrier to students to joining the University or an enabler– another way of looking at this is what helped and what stopped students registering and joining their course.