Spotlight on scholarship

OU research into how students learn and how best to teach them - what the OU refers to as scholarship - is going a long way towards improving the OU student experience.

Research into how students learn

Having a student buddy boosts motivation

Students benefit from having a buddy to play the role of mentor, according to a scheme run by the Faculty of Wellbeing Education and Languages (WELS).

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Studying later in the day could work better

Research has discovered that productivity in students is much greater between the hours of 11:00am and 9:30pm than at other times of day.

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Making links outside study groups breeds success

Students who extend their learning beyond their internal study groups, are more successful than those who rely solely on established groupings.

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Moving STEM assessment beyond multiple choice

The OU won a 2017 Higher Education Academy Collaborative Teaching Award for the creation of STACK, an open-source mathematics assessment system.

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Research into new ways to teach students

Bringing telescopes to students wherever they are

Another award-winning scholarship project, the OpenSTEM Labs, brings astronomy and space science to life for students whenever and wherever they are in the world.

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Making maths more accessible through sound

OU academics in Statistics in STEM working on statistics modules, looked at how graphs can be turned into sound to make them more accessible to maths students who are blind or visually impaired.

Assessing student learning with online analytics

STEM academics have built in online analytics to investigate student engagement with, and attitudes towards, the online interactive quizzes that form part of S217 Physics: from Classical to Quantum.