Formal inauguration took place at the Observatorio  del Teide on 6 July 2017

Outstanding Digital Innovation of the year THE Leadership & Management  award 2017 goes to OpenSTEM Labs (of which the OpenScience Laboratory is a part along with the OpenScience Observatories and the OpenEngineering Lab)

Want to know how the OU’s teaching laboratories are being launched into cyberspace? 

Watch the recording here:

Performing Online Live Experiments 24/7: “An Internet of Laboratory Things”

In Performing Online Live Experiments 24/7: “An Internet of Laboratory Things”, Professor Nick Braithwaite and colleagues will introduce the concept of the OpenSTEM Labs, which will in effect form an “Internet of Laboratory Things” that could be open all hours and available in a real distance learning setting. This is enabling OU students to work at a distance with a range of sophisticated, remote-controlled experiments and robotic apparatus.

A new wing in our virtual Labs will come on stream in 2017. The first activities in the OpenEngineering lab will feature remote experiments for electronics and control, and robotics; more engineering content will follow. 

The OpenSTEM Labs includes the OpenScience Observatories, the OpenEngineering Labs, the OpenScience Laboratory, Citizen Science platforms iSpotnature.org and treezilla.org, and on campus teaching labs.

A pdf of the March 2016 content is available for inspection here:

Visitors to the main OU campus in Milton Keynes will notice that the radio telescope (ARROW) is very busy repointing and tracking across the sky. 

This is because we currently have around 200 students using the ARROW remotely, in online groups of four, as part of their study of SXPA288 Practical Science: Physics & Astronomy. They are busy mapping the structure of our Galaxy by ‘listening’ for the 1.4 GHz radio emissions from hydrogen atoms several tens of thousands of light years away.

Each night other SXPA288 students are using our remotely operable optical telescope, the PIRATE Facility in Mallorca, to acquire their own observations of star clusters.

The OpenScience Laboratory is able to offer licensing arrangements that allow HEIs exclusive access to customised instances of a large fraction of the current lab content. If you are interested in this option please contact us via openscience@open.ac.uk

We were joined by a number of colleagues from around the world with expertise in designing and building remote experiments for teaching for a one day workshop. We had representatives from UK, Spain, Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland and Brazil. The workshop was also attended via Skype by colleagues in Australia and the US. Each party operated a remote experiment during the  morning session demonstrating a variety of robust approaches to the challenges of remotely controlled apparatus. We also exchanged ideas for scaffolding these remote-lab-tools to enable them to become valuable resources fro learning from and about practical science. We also had a series of focussed discussions on the pedagogical advantages of robotic experiments, how to incorporate opportunities for social learning in a geographically-distributed lab class and how to develop the student skills in techniques for assembling experimental apparatus from modular components.

We want to know how you are using the experiments within the Wolfson OpenScience Laboratory.

Please send your user stories to: openscience@open.ac.uk

eg:

Name/ Lily

Location/ Newport Pagnell, UK

Experiments used/ Treezilla, Situ8

Reason for using the Wolfson OpenScience Laboratory/ Enriching mother's post-PhD learning

The OpenScience Laboratory Team

Read about our recent success as THE 'Outstanding ICT initiative of the year' in the following article by JISC:

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/blog/celebrating-outstanding-ict-in-uk-higher-education-28-nov-2014

The OpenScience Lab has been shortlisted for 'Outstanding ICT initiative of the year' at the Times Higher Education awards.

OpenScience Observatory now taking bookings until end of June. Measure the Milky Way Galaxy with our simulated astronomical telescope.