Winner of the 7th eSTEeM Scholarship Projects of the Year Award 2024.
Retention and attainment of students with a mental health disability on Design modules is poor compared to other qualifications in Engineering and Innovation, STEM.
Students in Secure Environments (SiSE) can typically have different issues to other students from pre-registration through to the end of their studies.
UK universities (including the OU) have continued to struggle to recruit women to certain subjects within STEM despite best efforts to address this gender imbalance. In 2017, the OU introduced a ‘BSc (Hons) Combined STEM’ degree (R28) alongside its single and joint honours degrees in STEM.
Normally at the Open University Students in Secure Environments (SiSE) are allocated in small numbers to standard tutor groups to form mixed groups of 20 students, of whom 1 or 2 would typically be SiSE students.
Projects and teamwork are the predominant context in which most engineers work. Providing supported learning experience of such contexts supports employability for our students.
The aim of this project was to conduct a scoping study into why lower numbers of female graduates choose nuclear fusion Ph.D.s relative to other physical sciences. This is a particularly nuanced study as we are considering the nuclear fusion research pathway in comparison to other STEM routes.