Dr Trevor Collins

The proportion of students with disabilities registered on undergraduate STEM programmes has increased significantly over the past decade. Embedding and sustaining inclusive STEM practices project addresses how inclusive processes and academic practices become embedded within institutions, to enable equality of opportunity for students with disabilities studying STEM disciplines.

The aim of this proposal is to embed public engagement with research within The Open University’s (OU) strategic planning for research and the operational practices of researchers at all levels; to become an open research university.

Mobile technologies bring the digital and the physical worlds together by providing just-in-time/contextual information related to what people are observing, visiting or walking past. However, people with mobility disabilities or socio-economic limitations are often prevented from experiencing these new forms of user experience. We are proposing an alternative approach through developing hybrid ‘social inclusion’ solutions that aim to support collaboration between teams moving around ‘in the field’ and those ‘in the home’. This proposal will develop new ways of connecting existing mobile and shared table-top technologies to support synchronous distributed team collaboration that enables innovative forms of vicarious experiences. An educational prototype system for investigating aspects of the environment will be built to demonstrate and evaluate the effectiveness of the approach for supporting distributed team collaboration. With this project we seek to build systems with middlewear that will link information resource systems and co-located table-top collaboration applications at the home-base with and mobile data collection and communication devices. This will require seamless translation of mobile data collection (i.e. audio, video, geological readings) into table-top displays e.g. mash-ups between geological readings in the wild linked to mappings on table-tops. Partner companies will support the development of viable propositions. The software company, specialising in mobile learning applications, OOKL, will support the synchronous collaboration between mobile and home-based applications. SMART, who specialise in tabletop solutions for educational applications, are in the business of developing ‘ecology of technologies’ through the seamless interaction between devices and displays i.e middleware for table-tops.