Celebrating a year of STEMDA at City St George’s

STEMDA, the School of Science & Technology’s online digital academy currently delivers fully online MSc programmes in Computer Science, which are designed for those looking to upskill in fields such as programming, AI, machine learning, data analytics, and cyber security.

Students can start at any time and progress at their own pace, gaining the knowledge and skills needed to advance their careers in the ever-evolving tech industry.

This summer, City St George’s, University of London held a panel event to reflect on the first year of STEMDA, including on the challenges overcome in starting the academy, and how it will develop over the next year and beyond.

Professor Neil Audsley, Director of the STEM Digital Academy, opened the event, and said:

Having previous experience of building and delivering successful online computer science MSc programmes, I was aware we needed USPs [unique selling points] in order to compete in a very competitive market, and we needed to differentiate City St George’s within that market.

We settled upon the ability to start the course and modules on any day of the year, the so called 365 start points, and also to allow students to self-pace their learning.

All of our content and programmes have been designed in an asynchronous way. This is mindful of the fact that our students may not only be living across the globe, but many will have jobs that aren’t ‘9 to 5’. They will have varied shift and work patterns, and they need learning that can work around those.

While students work through the modules in a set order, one of the distinct things about STEMDA is the need to not necessarily complete their assessments, but their learning to move on to the next module. This gives us extra flexibility. For instance, if they’re in between work, or they have a break – they might be a school teacher and it’s the summer holidays – they can do a little extra learning if they have the capacity. And when it’s busier, they can dial it down.

Yes. There is and there’s also space for partnerships between those organisations, like we have with City St George’s, where we provide a lot of the groundwork in the marketing and IT system integrations, while City St George’s provides the expertise in pedagogy and academic side of things – and it works beautifully. I think the question is more of who is going to succeed in this market.

We’re looking to make our teaching and assessments fit with what students will need to do in legal practice. They need to be able to use generative AI in a critical way, be able to check their sources properly and so on. But it is a challenge to achieve this though our materials and teaching, because of the jigsaw of things that need to be done. Nevertheless, the landscape has changed, and best use of ‘online’ resources really does help.

Generally, if you want to create that ultimate personalisation of assessment, it’s a challenge for all of us who work on that, and we’re not there yet, but if you can do the first two levels, I think that’s a fantastic achievement.

The progress and success of STEMDA at this point is a real testimony to the leadership that the School put in place, and their persistence, working closely with the wider university: including IT, Learning Enhancement and Development (LEaD), Student Support, and others, even when it seemed as if it would not be possible or might be too hard to achieve the set-up.

The concept and vision of STEMDA very much align with City St George’s strategy, to be The University of business, practice and the professions, to open opportunities for students and learners from all walks of life, and to meet students in a student-centred way, where and when they need us to be pedagogically, as well as in other sorts of ways.