eSTEeM

Centre for Scholarship and Innovation

Conference delegates working in groups

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

138 results found

Writing retreats for level 1 students

Victoria Nicholas Paul Collier

Students frequently cite time pressure as a challenge to successful study.

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Understanding Passive Withdrawals on S111

Victoria Pearson Linda Moore Maria Velasco

In every presentation of S111, there has been a percentage of students who remain registered until the end of the module but have had limited or even no engagement with the module content and assessment.  In some cases, they may have never logged on to the VLE at all despite attempts from AL

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Postcard Confessions: Deepening Understanding of Students via their Hopes and Dreams

James Warren Georgy Holden

We think that we know our students, but do we fully understand their hopes the reality of their daily lives?

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Can we reduce anxiety of students sitting remote exams? Sharing best practice between SPS and LHCS

Gemma Warriner Fiona Moorman Becca Whitehead

Winner - eSTEeM Scholarship Projects of the Year Awards 2025.

Our project was a cross school collaboration between the School of Physical Sciences (SPS) and the Life, Health and Chemical Sciences (LHCS).

Rationale for our approach

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Evaluation of online journal club (OJC) in S285: to what extent does this help students develop employability skills?

Lorraine Waters Rachel McMullan

Developing employability skills have been identified as an Open University priority; there is evidence that these transferable ‘soft’ skills are often limited in science graduates entering the workplace.

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What is known about how to write online exams and how to prepare students for them?

Martin Braun

When the Covid pandemic affected education, universities around the globe had to move not only their content delivery online, but also their assessments.

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Enrichment workshops to enhance student engagement and employability

Janet Haresnape Ruth Gilbert Heather Fraser Hanne Bown David Ruiz Hannah Gandy

The aim of this project was to evaluate the programme of enrichment workshops which had been offered to biology and health sciences students in the School of Life, Health and Chemical sciences at the Open University during the summer months in 2022 and 2023.  The aims of the enrichment works

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Building a sense of community in a core 2nd level Physics module (S217) and investigating qualitatively its effect on retention

Anne-Katrin Klehe

The OU has a broad intake of students from a very wide breadth of educational backgrounds. Most students study part time, mostly up to 60 credits per year while at the same time working full time, looking after a family and/or caring for someone.

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Which factors are correlated with undergraduate engineering distance learning students’ expectations of ethical issues?

Joanna Sessford

Ethics is becoming an increasingly important part of engineering curriculum. Engineers need to be able to recognise and make ethical decisions in their working life. This is essential for a number of different reasons including to avoid potentially life taking disasters. 

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Postgraduate Project Management: evaluation of student employability skills development

Kay Bromley Jill Shaw Joan Jackson

M815 Project Management is part of the postgraduate computing programme and can also be studied by MSc students in Technology Management, Environmental Management, Engineering, Systems Thinking in Practice or Space Science and Open MSc/MA. This proposed scholarship project is motivated by tu

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