Pedagogy 2025
Abstract
Online Program Management (OPM) is a partnership model that enables universities to delegate the construction and delivery of online courses to a specialist company. Universities provide subject-specific academic expertise and the OPM does the rest. Some see the OPM model as an immoral marketisation of education, whereas others see it as a noble and highly effective method for expanding access to a huge number of students who cannot study on-campus. At University of the Arts London, we have hybridised the OPM and the art school to create our own thing: a diverse team of highly capable people with extensive experience of both the OPM way and art school pedagogy, collaborating with UAL’s six colleges to build large-scale fully online art and design courses. This endeavour is called UAL Online (UALO). Alongside UALO’s Commercial and Production divisions sits the Academic Strategy team, whose job is to interrogate, contemplate, guide and support this enterprise, and help ensure ‘UAL-ness’ is not lost in translation. Using a research method based on Grounded Theory, the Academic Strategy team have been conducting open-ended interviews with the key people involved in the UALO project. We have had fascinating conversations with the individuals leading on production, commercial, data analytics, learning design, project management, student success, admissions, marketing and senior management, as well as our college-based academics. In this video, we present a poetic interpretation of our findings which reveals the feelings and passions of the human cogs in our course-making engine. Spoiler: everyone cares most about the student.
Ian Truelove is Research and Innovation Coordinator for University of the Arts London Online, which has been established to build large-scale fully online art and design courses. In this role, Truelove draws on his 25+ years of experience as a lecturer, researcher, course leader and external examiner. His academic research interrogates the intersections of technology, psychology, philosophy, creativity and learning. In his artistic practice, he explores what it means to be a human artist in an age that is increasingly dominated by the terrifying wonder of artificial intelligence.
Dave White is Dean of Academic Strategy for University of the Arts London Online and President of the Association for Learning Technology. Beyond UAL he is best known for the Digital Visitors and Residents continuum (V&R), an approach to understanding how humans relate to the digital environment. The V&R mapping activity is used globally in research, curriculum and staff development. Dave writes about the relationship between digital, education and creativity at https://daveowhite.com