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.

Assessment is at the core of teaching and learning at the Open University.  It is used to measure student learning against institutional and AQA standards and, most importantly, assessment has a pivotal role in consolidating student understanding and in supporting progression along their lea

Highly Commended at the 7th eSTEeM Scholarship Projects of the Year Awards 2024.

Winner of the 8th Best Poster Competition at the 12th eSTEeM Annual Conference, 19-20 April 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 of the 8th eSTEeM Scholarship Projects of the Year Award 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.