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

51 results found

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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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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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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Evaluation and improvement of print packs use for Environmental Science students

Fiona Aiken Chris Hutton

Winner of the 8th eSTEeM Scholarship Projects of the Year Award 2025.

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Typical Support Seeking Behaviour of STEM Students, their Outcomes and Successes

Paul Collier Fiona Aiken

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

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Impact of introducing new practical and dataset project options to the science undergraduate capstone project module (S390)

Hannah Gauci Julie Robson Jon Golding Janette Wallace

S390 is the undergraduate science capstone project module.

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Black student experience and attainment on S112: improving a level 1 STEM module

Louise MacBrayne Jennie Bellamy

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.

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An evaluation of use and impact of zero grades in assessment; are we being consistent, fair, and transparent?

Karen New Fiona Moorman

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

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