Supporting students

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

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

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

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

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

How leaders choose to lead inevitably has impacts on those who follow them. From the beginning of AstrobiologyOU, its directors have aspired to lead the group collaboratively.

The purpose of this research is to engage with Stage 2 engineering students, studying T272 Core Engineering B module, about different modes of online activities and how effective these are in engaging, informing, and reinforcing their learning.

At the Open University in the UK, final year engineering undergraduates are required to suggest a topic for their project.

A number of STEM students find their modules academically demanding; success for such students requires the development of resilience and a growth mindset, as discussed in Johnston-Wilder and Lee (2010.

Students on IT/computing degrees at the Open University (OU) complete a compulsory project at the end of their studies (TM470), yet some students face challenges completing the project due to difficulties with independent work. The prompt for this study was students’ poor performance on TM47