Research news

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.

‘Enriched realities’ and ‘Using chatbots in learning’ are two of the top ten new approaches to learning and teaching, according to this year’s Innovating Pedagogy 2021 report, co-authored by colleagues in The Open University’s Institute of Educational Technology (IET).

A homeschooling project, lead by WELS academics and geared towards inspiring hope and celebrating Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) diversity, has been awarded funding from the OU’s COVID-19 Rapid Response fund.

Dr Verina Waights, in collaboration with Willen Hospice, has received funding to enhance the use of technologies in a hospice; piloting and evaluating the use of digital technologies to enhance communications for service users and their families during the pandemic.

Joe Hanley, Social Work Lecturer, is leading a project to support social workers during the pandemic, piloting free online CPD to rapidly upskill social workers.