Poetry in the Motions of the Education Engine

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.

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-D0sA2A...