eSTEeM Seminar Series: Scholarship Showcase - June 2023

Location: Via MS Teams
Contact

eSTEeM continues its seminar series with presentations from project teams. June’s seminar will explore the methodology and findings of the following two eSTEeM projects.

From eSTEeM to the Open Computing Lab

Mark Hall and Soraya Kouadri Mostéfaoui

Providing students with a computing-lab-like experience is one of the more complex activities in a distance-learning context for two main reasons. First, distributing the required software to students is complicated, as students will own a wide variety of hardware and operating system combinations. Supporting this wide range of combinations creates a significant overhead. Second, the hardware owned by students will often not be sufficiently powerful, which impacts the students’ learning experience. The Open Computing Lab (OCL) developed out of an eSTEeM funded project and addresses these two main issues by providing an online hosted computing environment that students can access with their web-browser and which comes with all the required software preconfigured and provides students with the required computing power. The flexibility of the OCL means that we are currently supporting around 1000 students per month on a range of modules from across the faculty.

Lessons and insights from student co-design of formative assessment

Paul Piwek and Simon Savage

Central to the current eSTEeM project was a co-design workshop with student partners to redesign several formative quiz questions. The workshop took place on the Open University’s campus, in Milton Keynes. In our talk, we will describe the preparations for the workshop, the workshop itself, feedback from the student partners (at the workshop and a later online session) and our evaluation of the co-design process.