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Pawley, Susan; Chang, Daphne and Ford, Diane
(2024).
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 13 years of experience, eSTEeM is the STEM Faculty’s Scholarship and Innovation Centre based 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:
- Design, investigate and evaluate innovative approaches to teaching and learning.
- 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
In April 2024, eSTEeM held their 13th annual conference, titled Sharing Scholarship and Best Practice – Implementing What Works. Open to all staff and students connected with scholarship, celebrating and disseminating current practice within the STEM Faculty we attracted nearly 200 attendees either online or face-to-face in a blended format. The conference is one example of how eSTEeM develops new pathways for future growth and development of both scholarship practitioners and teaching and learning within the STEM faculty. During day two of the conference, we held a workshop exploring some of the approaches by which projects can influence practice and ways we can overcome the barriers to implementing what works. Additionally, we launched our inaugural Conference Proceedings Journal, designed to allow authors to publish short pieces of scholarship or teaching innovation as a result of a project presented at the eSTEeM conference. With an aim of allowing new authors to publish in a “friendly” and fully supported environment and gain valuable experience writing papers.
During this presentation we will explains the mechanism and methodology behind the work of eSTEeM and outline our activities for creating pathways for future growth and development. The examples of such activities include a continuous professional development programme to allow STEM practitioners to build a sustainable community, a framework to capture internal impact, increasing the involvement of students in the development of scholarship and a new initiative to cascade findings of scholarship projects.
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)
