Abstract:

At a time when pedagogy at higher education institutions is rapidly evolving, the need for good quality and meaningful scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) to improve the student experience and develop the professional skills of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) academics has never more important.

With over 11 years of experience, eSTEeM is the centre for STEM pedagogy at the Open University (OU) in the UK. The main aim of the centre is to guide the scholarship activities of the STEM Faculty through fostering a dynamic community engaged in innovative and sustainable SoTL and educational research. These activities are intended to:
- Improve the student experience.
- Create a supported open learning environment that attracts and retains students.
- Develop the capacity and professional skills of academics to engage in scholarship of teaching and learning.
- Enhance the external profile of our scholarship

We focus on supporting practitioner-led, evidence-based scholarship that seeks to enhance the student experience in open and distance STEM education. Since its formation, eSTEeM has supported over 200 projects. In our model, once a project has been adopted, we provide on-going support to project leaders in planning, identifying of research methodology, and evaluation, as well as access to a mentoring scheme. In addition, eSTEeM helps project leaders to disseminate their findings to colleagues both internally and externally and to think about maximising the impact of their work.

Building on the success of eSTEeM and its model of practitioner support, in 2018 scholarship centres were established in all faculties of The Open University. eSTEeM now works closely with these centres in supporting and developing pan-university scholarship and knowledge exchange.

During this presentation we will describe the methodology behind our support, including how we have created a scholarship focused continuous professional development programme that allows our practitioners to build a community of scholars engaged in STEM scholarship of teaching and learning. We will also discuss our current initiatives which enables greater engagement of students as co-collaborators and investigators within scholarship projects.

Keywords:

Support, SOTL, scholarship, pedagogy.