Dr Daphne Chang

Professional biography

I am a Senior Lecturer and Staff Tutor for the Open University (School of Engineering and Innovation, STEM Faculty).  I have held leadership positions within the school and led successful interventions for improving student attainment and experience.  I currently have two leadership roles; one of which is to provide academic leadership for Access, Participation and Student Success for the school.  I am also the Director for the Centre for the Scholarship and Innovation of the STEM Faculty (eSTEeM), responsible for providing academic leadership in matters of scholarship across the STEM Faculty, facilitating and dissemination of good scholarship practice and research outputs and championing/representing eSTEeM within and beyond the OU.    

I have developed expertise and experience in delivering synchronous and asynchronous academic development courses in both online and face-to-face environments.  I regularly supervise Chinese visiting scholars to the OU and deliver tutoring skills workshops to online and distance learning practitioners in China. 

Research interests

My research interests include academic professional development, learning design and global citizenship in STEM education.   The most recent scholarship project I was part of, Measuring the impact of the LDCC workshops, received a Highly Commended award at the 7th eSTEeM Scholarship Projects of the Year Awards 2024. I am currently part of the project team for an OU Open Societal Challenges (OSC) project, Enhancing the quality of learning and teaching in the Chinese Open University system.  The findings of this project will form the basis of a Research Excellence Framework (REF) Impact Case Study for submission in 2029. 

I am a regular reviewer for Open Learning: The Journal of Open, Distance and e-Learning.

A full list of my published work can be found in the 'Publications' tab on this site. 

Teaching interests

I am interested in the pedagogy of online collaborative work and embedding global citizenship in STEM curriculum.  As the Access and Participation Plan (APP) lead of the school, I was invited to speak about the role that universities can play in promoting gender diversity in engineering at the Royal Academy of Engineering's Diversity Impact Programme (DIP) community of practice event at Edinburgh in February 2025.  Currently, I am writing teaching contents for a third level environment management module and a second level design module.