About Us

Our history

The OpenSTEM Labs were created in 2015 through a capital investment grant from the then Higher Education Funding Council for England. The development project grew out of the OpenScience Laboratory (established in 2013 with funding from the Wolfson Foundation). Since then we have continued to expand into new disciplines and to grow our equipment base to provide the STEM curriculum with unprecedented access to laboratory and field investigations in a distance learning context.

Our vision

We empower STEM students to achieve their goals by developing skills and knowledge through online practical and practice-based learning activities using specialist equipment and authentic digital resources.

Our mission

The OpenSTEM Labs are a collaboration between academics, lab teams, developers and other professional services staff to create, manage and maintain online practical and practice-based learning activities for students in the STEM disciplines.

Our values

The core values of the OpenSTEM Labs are:

Active: Engaging students in practical experiments and activities.
Authentic: Working with data from real equipment, observations, models and publications.
Student-centred: Tailoring activities to facilitate student learning.
Inclusive: For students, at any time, from any place.

Our Executive Dean, Prof. Nicholas Braithwaite, explains what we do in more detail …

Our assets

Our list of experiments grows all the time as we add new equipment and activities to enabel further STEM disciplines to be explored. Here is just a taster of current assets….

100 electronics workstations
7 analytical chemistry tools
2 state-of-the-art scanning electron microscopes
2 optical microscopes
2 research grade optical telescopes
1 enclosed ‘Mars landscape’ and remote controlled, multi-user Mars rover
Digitally enabled labs for live streaming of experiments
5 wind tunnels
8 thick-walled pressure vessels
Ideal gas experiment
Over 50 interactive screen experiments using real data and authentic interfaces
2 digital particle cameras allowing real-time display of ionizing radiation.

All accessed over the internet through a web browser, a user has no need for specialist software or equipment.

A complementary set of on-screen experiments link archival data to virtual instruments with varying degrees of virtual or augmented reality.

Visit the OpenSTEM Labs

Our OpenSTEM Labs are available to license, offering an authentic lab experience that is perfect for distance learning. Visit our Education Partnerships website to find out more

Get in touch

Email: openstemlabs@open.ac.uk