eSTEeM is 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 outputs.
eSTEeM supports a rolling portfolio of approx. 80 active scholarship projects under a number of themes which include:
Access, Participation and Success
Innovative assessment
Online/onscreen STEM practice
Supporting students
Technologies for STEM learning
To learn more about our projects, please click on the project titles or use the search feature below by entering keywords. To search by the name of a project leader, please use the 'Filter by Project Leader' tab on the right-hand side of this page.
The search found 17 result(s)
Search results
Elaine McPherson Mary Keys
UK universities (including the OU) have continued to struggle to recruit women to certain subjects within STEM despite best efforts to address this gender imbalance. In 2017, the OU introduced a ‘BSc (Hons) Combined STEM’ degree (R28) alongside its single and joint honours degrees in STEM.
June 2020 to December 2022
Carol Morris Rachel Slater
Students from BAME groups appear to perform less well than their white counterparts across all modules in E&I.
October 2021 to December 2024
Hayley Ryder Tacey O'Neil
Issue: student well-being and anxiety. Accessibility of tutorial type resources.
Many students experiencing problems with abstract mathematics either already experience maths anxiety or develop it. They can also lack self-efficacy and mathematical resilience.
November 2020 to January 2025
Louise MacBrayne Zoë Chapman
Practical work in the form of home experiments has always formed an integral part of the science curriculum, in particular at level one. The move, however, from printed materials to online delivery has been accompanied by a change in the way students are supported in home experiments.
November 2022 to February 2025
Donald Edwards Mark Slaymaker
This project seeks to understand our current performance against EDI, widening participation and success (WPS) targets on postgraduate qualifications run by the schools of C&C and E&I, collectively Postgraduate Technology and Computing (PTC).
November 2022 to November 2023
Jill Shaw Rehana Awan Jim Gillen Mark Slaymaker Katharine Jewitt
The project will investigate patterns in the demographics and referral data, and student perceptions for Level 1 students who are referred to the Academic Conduct (AC) Office within C&C. Several research projects (e.g.
November 2022 to December 2024
Jo Buxton
The research intends to assess how a framework (MACE) can help tutors make online tutorials more accessible and inclusive.
June 2023 to December 2024
Miriam Fernandez Geoffray Bonnin
This project focuses on the potential for digital educational tools to provide more inclusive learning. More precisely, we will study to what extent two types of interrelated learning analytics models could be exploited to promote inclusion.
June 2023 to August 2024
Sue Pawley Nicola McIntyre Gemma Warriner Becca Whitehead
Maths Anxiety can be described as “an emotion that blocks a person’s reasoning ability when confronted with a mathematical situation” [Spicer 2004], in an extreme form, “when confronted with a math problem, the sufferer has sweaty palms, is nauseous, has heart palpitations, and experiences paraly
May 2023
