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

90 results found

Teaching distributed computing using Raspberry Pi clusters at a distance

Daniel Gooch

A Parallel and distributed computing (PDC) is now considered a threshold concept for computing, and is embedded in computing curricula across the globe.

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Accessibility and inclusion in tuition (AccIT)

Rachel Slater Anne Campbell Elaine McPherson

The AccIT project has four main aims:

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Associate Lecturers’ Involvement in Improved Practice in a SXPS288 Labcast Delivery

Venetia Brown

Tutors who work in distance education often have less opportunities to participate in important, practical science experiences with colleagues.

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Pair Programming as a tool to enhance teaching and learning of programming at a distance

Adeola Adeliyi

Pair programming promotes immediate, informal collaboration over coding activities. The driving developer writes the code and controls the keyboard and mouse; the navigating developer checks the code as it is written by the driver, and the developers swap their roles frequently.

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An investigation into the way Jupyter Notebooks enhance learning and teaching on TM351

Sharon Dawes Autumn Thomson

TM351 Data management and analysis has used Jupyter (2019) notebooks for practical work from its inception in 2016 and this project investigated how the notebooks supported students' learning.

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Improving and evaluating inclusivity in group project work for distance-learning engineering students

Alice Moncaster Hedieh Jazaeri

Projects and teamwork are the predominant context in which most engineers work. Providing supported learning experience of such contexts supports employability for our students.

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SiSE only tutor groups and the effect on SiSE students and their tutors

Laura Alexander Linda Moore Victoria Nicholas

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.

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Investigating the motivations of female students choosing an open versus named qualification

Elaine McPherson Mary Keys

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.

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An investigation into the breadth of learning objectives and skills developed in OpenSTEM Labs experiments

Helen Lockett

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

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Evaluation of D-flag students accessibility to and use of online tutorials and forums in L2 modules

Sarah Daniell Lorraine Waters

It remains the case that despite different initiatives to encourage tutorial attendance, few students attend live online tutorials in LHCS.

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