STEMinar Series: eSTEeM Scholarship Showcase January 2024

Dates: 

Tuesday, January 9, 2024 - 14:00 to 15:00

Location

Via MS Teams

Contact

eSTEeM

New for 2024, the eSTEeM, Learning and Teaching, and Equality, Diversity, Inclusivity and Accessibility (EDIA) Teams are bringing together their webinar series under the STEMinar Series banner. STEMinars will be held fortnightly, alternating between Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Learning from improvers: Applying lessons from scholarship to module production

Cathy Smith and Charlotte Lighter

In this seminar, we will share key findings from our eSTEeM project: Effective support for reflective writing in mathematics: Learning from improvers and explain how these findings have directly impacted on module production (and presentation) on Mathematics Education modules. One project objective was to identify potential for supporting students through resources other than written guidance, leading to the production of creative module resources and assessments as a result of our findings. The impact of this project was thus to diversify valued ways of communicating within the module, through the development of module content and more inclusive assignments. For us, the value of the Learning from Improvers project has been in using students’ knowledge to inform and improve future teaching, so we hope to share our insights gained from this project with the aim of supporting others to think creatively about the ways they can support their students.

Interactive Online Maths Problem-Solving Sessions

Abi Kirk

This talk centres on a new design for an online Maths problem-solving session involving interaction and speech by students. The design has been conceived, implemented and evaluated during the presenter's eSTEeM project. There is evidence that few students speak in online OU STEM tutorials, but they do speak in online individual support sessions (ISS), so the design was based on data gathered about ISS. The resulting session design, consisting of Initial Quiz, Mathematical Icebreaker, and problem-solving using three group-work styles, will be presented in the talk. The design was tested with students of M337 Complex Analysis on occasions a year apart. It ran in Adobe Connect, with MS OneNote used in addition. The data gathered during the testing will be outlined. The talk will then present the main findings from this testing. It will describe in what way each aspect of the design was effective, and what issues arose. The main recommendations for improving the aspects will be set out. Some of these recommendations were tested the second time the design was used, and some emerged at that second testing.

Registration

The STEMinar Series is open to all OU STEM colleagues. Please visit the registration page to sign-up. Any queries please contact esteem@open.ac.uk.

Related resources: 

Attachment	Size
Cathy-Smith-Charlotte-Lighter-STEMinar-9-Jan-24.pptx	3.18 MB

Project presentation.

Attachment	Size
Abi-Kirk-STEMinar-9-Jan-24.pptx	2.8 MB

Project presentation.