Research news

Enhancement of the support currently offered to families with a parent or primary carer in prison is the goal of the ‘Families First’ project, a two-year study led by the OU's Children’s Research Centre, in partnership with charity YSS.

Building on a partnership that delivered the hugely successful Pan Commonwealth Forum (PCF9) in Edinburgh in 2019, two MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) were developed by WELS colleagues to support the professional development of inclusive education for teachers and teacher educators in Africa.

National supermarket chain Morrisons, working in conjunction with the Reading for Pleasure project has launched a book donation and exchange station for children, in its stores across the UK. The Morrisons Children’s Little Library aims to promote reading and literacy in children, particularly those who come from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Academics from WELS will present their work next week at the “OU COVID-19 Research: Online Learning and Education” seminar. The event showcases OU-funded projects which have aimed to improve and support aspects of online learning and education during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The OU is collaborating with De Montfort and other UK universities in a study to identify best practice for the Higher Education sector on ‘embedding mental wellbeing’ in the curriculum.

Four academics from the Faculty of WELS have been promoted to Professor. Find out more about them and their work. 

Do the labels we (and the media) assign to towns, cities or regions have wider consequences for structural inequality?

We caught up with WELS academics Dr Jenny Douglas, Senior Lecturer in Health Promotion, and Kate Lister, Lecturer in Education Studies, to hear more about their personal experiences of gender bias in academia and to find out how being a woman in research has impacted their career in a positive way.

Research conducted by WELS colleagues during the pandemic-enforced school closures in Zimbabwe explores the complexities of remote learning for many children in low-income countries who are offline.

Citizen science researchers at The Open University's Institute of Educational Technology (IET) have made recommendations to National History Museums to improve how young people can be supported to engage in structured learning when at field-based events and in remote, home settings.