Access, Participation and Success

An evaluation of use and impact of zero grades in assessment; are we being consistent, fair, and transparent?

Assessment is at the core of teaching and learning at the Open University.  It is used to measure student learning against institutional and AQA standards and, most importantly, assessment has a pivotal role in consolidating student understanding and in supporting progression along their learning

Black student experience and attainment on S112: improving a level 1 STEM module

Highly Commended at the 7th eSTEeM Scholarship Projects of the Year Awards 2024.

Winner of the 8th Best Poster Competition at the 12th eSTEeM Annual Conference, 19-20 April 2023.

Impact of introducing new practical and dataset project options to the science undergraduate capstone project module (S390)

S390 is the undergraduate science capstone project module.

Typical Support Seeking Behaviour of STEM Students, their Outcomes and Successes

The importance of personal, non-academic support of students especially in a distance learning environment is well documented in the literature.

Evaluation and improvement of print packs use for Environmental Science students

There is a legal requirement to provide students who have declared disabilities with reasonable adjustments which address their learning needs. An Advance HE report on this (Falsinger & Bryford, 2010) includes ‘resources available’ as a reasonable adjustment to address.

Accessibility of Jupyter Notebooks on M269

When M269 (Algorithms, data structures and computability) was rewritten in 2021, all learning, practical work and assessment content was presented by means of Jupyter notebooks rather than having a mixture of theory on the VLE, two printed textbooks and practical work using an IDE.

Associate Lecturer Disability Champion scheme at the Open University (E&I-STEM)

The Disability Champion project was a pilot programme to support ALs in their teaching of students in design with disability flags given that the proportion of students within this group has been steadily rising over recent years.

Decolonising Computing: A Resource for Educators

Decolonising the curriculum (DTC) is a university-wide initiative within the broader decolonising the university (DTU) project overseen by the EDI Dean with mandate from the VC. The current focus of DTC work in the STEM faculty is on Level 1 modules in all schools.

Barriers and enablers to higher education: the experiences of disabled students from minority cultural backgrounds

This project will take an intersectional approach and examine the student experience from the combined perspectives of BAME and disability as many students fall into more than one of these categories: in 2019 there were 10,543 students registered in STEM of which 1,246 were BAME and 2,079 were re

Effective support for reflective writing: learning from improvers

This report focusses on an in‐depth study of 12 students identified as ‘improvers’ in Mathematics Education modules.