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FASSTEST brings together colleagues from across the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, 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 outcomes. FASSTEST supports a rolling portfolio of approximately 40 active scholarship projects under a number of themes which include:

  • Online and blended tuition
  • Assessment
  • Employability/careers
  • Equality, diversity and inclusion
  • Mental health and wellbeing
  • Multisensory/multimodal learning

If you are interested in learning more about a particular project or connecting with a project team, please contact us at FASS-Scholarship@open.ac.uk

Projects

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7 results found

Embedding Employability Resources in DB125: An Evaluation

Project leader(s):  Jonquil Lowe

DB125 You and Your Money replaced DB123 from October 2018J.

Supporting DD102 Students to Develop the ‘Reflection on and Articulation of Employability Skills’

Project leader(s):  Ieman Hassan

The project aims are to draw on employability guidance to enable ALs through a practitioner enquiry to ‘make the components of employability explicit to students’ in order to further ‘support students in articulating their skills, values and behaviours gained and developed through their study at

Criminology: Where Do They Go? A Thematic Analysis of Final Year Criminology Students Pursuing Career Development or Career Change

Project leader(s):  Deborah Drake Karen Sharpe

A key objective of this project is to find ways of ensuring that students are on the right pathway and make the right qualification choices at the outset. This will help to improve the learning experience of students and support retention and progression.

The Role of Peer-to-Peer Mentoring in a Distance Learning University: An Evaluation of a Three-Year Pilot in the Arts and Social Sciences

Project leader(s):  Joanna Robson Tina Forbes Sue Watkins

Following two successful small-scale pilots in 2015 and 2017 the current project evaluates the upscaled peer-to-peer mentoring scheme rolled out in the Open University’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences in 2020 - 2023.

Raising Student Awareness of Employability Through Multiple Curriculum Adjustments at the Module Level

Project leader(s):  Jonquil Lowe

DB125 You and Your Money replaced DB123 from October 2018J.

An Investigation into the Use of Peer Observation as a Tool for Professional Development and an Aid to Developing a Professional Evaluative Culture Among Associate Lecturers

Project leader(s):  Judith Wilson-Hughes Tatiana Blackmore Liz Wright

The idea for this scholarship project stemmed from the search for alternative routes of professional development which can be offered to Associate Lecturers (tutors).  The recent changes in teaching practice following the introduction of the group tuition policy in 2016 brought a shift

The OU and Scotland’s Colleges’ Collaborative Teaching Partnership: An Evaluation

Project leader(s):  Gerry Mooney Janet Cole Iain Macpherson Steven McGeever Khadija Patel

The primary purpose of the proposed project was to: