Since its inception in 1969, the Open University has embraced technological innovation, from late-night TV lectures in the 1970s to recent investments in digital estate, virtual reality, artificial intelligence and ed-tech. Harnessing the latest technologies – especially those that bring a classroom feel to an online setting – remains at the heart of its mission to widen access to education for all.
At the forefront of this endeavour is the OpenSTEM Labs project, a bespoke and award-winning virtual teaching lab that enables students to study STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) subjects anytime, anywhere.
Prof Nicholas Braithwaite is the director of the OpenSTEM Labs and a pioneer in practical science teaching. He describes the OpenSTEM Labs project as distance-learning’s “equivalent of a laboratory block on a conventional campus”. The project’s four core values – authenticity, veracity, inclusivity and pedagogy – ensure that OU students can conduct realistic inquiry-based learning in an environment that is as close to hands-on as possible, using real pieces of apparatus. This removes some of the barriers to conventional engagement with practical work for distance-learners.
“A large number of people are excluded from conventional learning because they have caring responsibilities, transport challenges or work commitments, and getting to a lab or field site can be an additional hurdle,” explains Braithwaite.
“Our students’ practical work isn’t simply ‘like’ a real-life laboratory experience – it is a real-life laboratory experience,” he adds. “It’s also pedagogically sound, because we’re leaving in the opportunity for people to make mistakes, to work collaboratively, and for over-the-shoulder interactions between learners and educators.”
Funded by a £2.6m grant from the Higher Education Funding Council for England in 2015, matched by the OU in 2016, the OpenSTEM Labs project was awarded outstanding digital innovation of the year at the Times Higher Education Leadership and Management Awards 2017 (Thelmas), and won the Guardian University Teaching Excellence award 2018.
Several tens of thousands of hours of use have already been logged, enabling the OU to expand the OpenSTEM labs into new courses in electronics and space science.
Learners can connect online to cutting-edge technical equipment, such as microscopes, robotic telescopes and rovers, and have remote access to lab-bench experiments and analytical instruments. Using PCs, laptops and even smartphones, students have controlled a research-grade astronomical telescope, situated on the Canary Islands, and conducted remote learning in a simulated Mars landscape situated on the Milton Keynes campus.
In addition to deploying the latest technologies and widening access by providing flexible and accessible learning solutions, the OU is playing a key role in upskilling the UK labour market, actively contributing to the much-needed uptake of STEM skills.
Elisa Wylie feels it’s no exaggeration to say she owes her career to the OU. A distance learner since 2004, she has completed two bachelor’s degrees via distance learning and now teaches A-level physics and chemistry. She is currently a student on the OU’s MSc in space science and technology course, and has worked extensively “in” the OpenSTEM Labs.
“I found school challenging because I struggled with dyslexia, but the OU’s modular approach is a way of working that I could cope with – the OU has given me the confidence to get to this stage of my career,” she says.
“I could never have imagined doing a course like this one – even when I first enrolled, there was a voice at the back of my head saying: ‘You can’t do this’. But the tutors are so supportive and build you up really gradually.”
Through the OpenSTEM Labs project, Wylie has had the opportunity to use a scanning electron microscope to look at the kind of damage caused by dust grains impacting spacecraft at high velocity. She has also used PIRATE, the robotic optical telescope based at the OU’s observatory in Tenerife, to follow up a recent alert from the Gaia satellite of a star that was suddenly changing in brightness.
“What I love about OpenSTEM Labs opportunities is that those hands-on experiences are linked with real-life events – it’s not just theoretical learning. We booked time on the telescope; then the system in Tenerife completed the observations we requested and sent us the data for us to analyse, and we actually uploaded our findings to the Cambridge Photometry Calibration Server.”
Thanks to the wonders of technology, many of the perceived limitations of distance learning are being eradicated. The fact that students aren’t co-located with the instruments they’re using, or even with other students, isn’t a shortcoming – it’s an authentic experience akin to those they’ll have in the real world.
“When it comes to accessing much of the equipment used in astrophysics,” says Wylie, “scientists don’t need to be physically present to press a big red button – it doesn’t work like that any more.
“The opportunities the OU affords distance learners enable you to operate as any other physicist would, and that’s what makes the course so thrilling. Far from being detached or disadvantaged by distance learning, I truly feel like I’m getting a look in the window and a foot in the door.”
Braithwaite adds that distance learning is a lifelong skill. “You can only go on learning in a classroom as long as people put you in a classroom, but you can learn at a distance forever. Even from Mars, if you had to.”
