Projects

eSTEeM is providing a mechanism for professional development through practice-based scholarship within a mentored community. Much of our work is organised on a project basis with project management aimed at the delivery of new educational outcomes and scholarship outputs. 

eSTEeM supports a rolling portfolio of approx. 80 active scholarship projects under a number of themes which include:

  • Access, Participation and Success
  • Innovative assessment
  • Online/onscreen STEM practice
  • Supporting students
  • Technologies for STEM learning

To learn more about our projects, please click on the project titles or use the search feature below by entering keywords. To search by the name of a project leader, please use the 'Filter by Project Leader' tab on the right-hand side of this page.

Search results

203 results found

Understanding the Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic attainment gap at the OU by means of quantitative and qualitative data analytics

Miriam Fernandez Martin Hlosta Tracie Farrell

Highly Commended at the 6th eSTEeM Scholarship Projects of the Year Awards 2023.

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Modern Container-based Learning Interface and Delivery Infrastructure (MCLIDI)

Mark Hall Soraya Kouadri Mostéfaoui

The Modern Containerised Learning Interface and Delivery Infrastructure project developed and deployed a modern online learning environment and the required delivery infrastructure.

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Effective support for reflective writing: learning from improvers

Cathy Smith Charlotte Lighter

This report focusses on an in‐depth study of 12 students identified as ‘improvers’ in Mathematics Education modules.

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Barriers and enablers to higher education: the experiences of disabled students from minority cultural backgrounds

Chris Corcoran

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.

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Challenges of assessment for a level 3 interdisciplinary module: an AL and student perspective

Jenny Duckworth Harriet Marshall

Student engagement and learning is strongly driven by assessment feedback. On the interdisciplinary module SDT306 (Environment: Responding to Change), tutors grade and provide feedback against learning outcomes (LOs) using a marking grid.

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Decolonising Computing: A Resource for Educators

Mustafa Ali

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.

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Cultivating student led tutorials in STEM

Melanie Gregg Vivien Cleary

The objective of this small-scale study was to create a tutor free, active learning environment where students feel at ease to discuss and work on skill-based problems together.

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Improving student use of feedback on marked Tutor Marked Assignments (TMAs)

Carol Calvert Clare Morris

The correspondence tuition that tutors provide, via the TMAs, is a key part of our teaching and support to students and represents a major investment of time and effort by tutors.

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Associate Lecturer Disability Champion scheme at the Open University (E&I-STEM)

Elouise Huxor Theodora Philcox Lisa Bowers

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.

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Accessibility of Jupyter Notebooks on M269

Alexis Lansbury Sharon Dawes

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.

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