The power of community at the eSTEeM Annual Conference

7th June 2022

‘Innovation Through Community’ was the overall theme of this year’s eSTEeM Annual Conference which took place online on the 11th and 12th May 2022. Eleven years on, the eSTEeM conference remains an important opportunity for the STEM scholarship community to share and discuss their work on teaching, learning and student support. eSTEeM has built a strong scholarship community of collegial and collaborative STEM practitioners; with the community now being more distributed due to our working practices, this year’s event was an opportunity to re-group and determine how best to adapt.   

The conference programme again provided a mixture of short oral talks, workshops and interactive poster presentations showcasing the innovative scholarship work conducted by STEM colleagues. Day one featured a panel conversation between established eSTEeM practitioners who reflected on the importance of interactions within and between stakeholder communities in fostering innovation, carrying out scholarship, and in driving impactful change of practice.

Also on day one, we welcomed a keynote presentation by David White, Head of Digital Education and Academic Practice at the University of the Arts London. Dave’s talk focused on what we should keep from our experiences of teaching and scholarship during the pandemic and how we must collectively develop new modes of working and connecting. The day two closing keynote presentation was given by Cate Cropper from the Central Teaching Laboratory based at the University of Liverpool. Cate described the discipline-based communities of practice that they’ve developed for teaching staff during the pandemic and their students’ sense of community.

We again recognised excellence in scholarship with the annual eSTEeM Scholarship Projects of the Year Awards, now in its fifth year. These awards are for completed eSTEeM projects which have submitted a final report between 1^st April 2021 and 31^st March 2022. The reports and project outputs were reviewed by a judging panel of six, comprising of the eSTEeM Directors, STEM Associate Dean (Academic Excellence), two STEM School Scholarship Leads and a Deputy Director from another Scholarship and Innovation Centre. The judges were extremely impressed by the standard and quality of the projects, which made this a difficult deliberation. Huge congratulations go to the following project teams -

Highly Commended 

• Title: Developing appropriate induction for STEM Associate Lecturers at the Open University
• Team: Hannah Gauci and Janette Wallace

• Title: Evaluation Report on the English for Academic Purposes (EAP) Support Project (2019-21): Analysing the impact of individualised EAP support sessions on student retention and academic skills development
• Team: Jo Fayram, John Woodthorpe, Lina Adinolfi and Sam Thorne

Winners 

• Title: Investigating the perceived benefits to computing students of remote pair programming
• Team: Janet Hughes, Ann Walshe, Bobby Law and Brendan Murphy

• Title: How are students using extensions and what is the impact on their success?
• Team: Catherine Halliwell and Cath Brown

Congratulations also go to Phil Hackett, Michel Wermelinger, Karen Kear and Chris Douce for winning the Best Interactive Poster Presentation for their poster - Teaching Programming at a Distance Using a Virtual Computing Lab.

To view the presentations and watch replays of the sessions, please visit the conference website.