 Hello, everyone. My name is Paul Protter. I work for Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University. This is a joint paper myself and Jacqueline. Unfortunately, Jacqueline is busy in Manchester today, so I'm going to deliver on my own, but I'm also delivering actually for all of the staff who have been involved in this project. It's about designing a new digital arts curriculum where technology inspires new stories and new experience and, in fact, new realities. I hope that the paper is going to be provocative. It's going to read a debate about how we can challenge our students, the digital and creative industries and ourselves as academics as part of a process of rethinking the educational experience. This will be done by charting the journey we've taken and are, in fact, still taking to develop a future proof, if that is indeed possible, curriculum for a new school of digital arts, which, throughout the paper, I'm going to be referring to as Soda, the acronym. Soda is due to open in 2021 on campus at Manchester Met. The school will bring together courses and disciplines from around faculty, including computing, business, user experience and media. The portfolio will include animation, filmmaking, games art, immersive arts, photography, sound and visual arts, and there are many more courses that will be coming on stream in addition to those. The intention is to build a school that has the capacity to enable students to work collaboratively to co-create across a range of disciplines in a bespoke environment that has the physical and educational resources for students to develop the skills and attributes to gain employment in the UK creative digital sectors, thereby filling, hopefully, the UK digital skills gap. This will require innovative approaches to nurturing talent that instills transdisciplinary methodologies at the heart of the learning experience for students, challenging our subject disciplines and encouraging not only a willingness but hopefully a desire in both staff and students to cross boundaries and acquire a broader range of skills that are suited to the flexible and adaptable ways of working in contemporary culture and responding to the fast pace of the change that the creative and digital sectors that we all know is facing. The foundational structure of Soda has been to achieve a series of structured design sprints that were modelled on a method developed by Jake Knapp, maybe you know Jake Knapp at Google Ventures. The aim of the sprints was to generate ideas, solve problems and test solutions through the designing of new models of learning and teaching suitable for a new generation of creatives. The sprints involved academics, it involved technical support, it involved professional services from across the university's faculties as well as partners from industry and key influences from around the world including HKU in Holland and Parsons and NYU in New York. These partners formed the crucial, really the crucial first steps for developing an inspired curriculum built on flexibility and an open approach to learning where not only the design of the curriculum was redressed but also the academic roles were questioned, this is a really key thing, questioning our roles and the roles of others within the institution. We needed to consider how academics and technical staff may work in an environment of the teacher, the coach, the advisor and the co-learner. This all proved incredibly challenging as you might imagine but also really exciting. So the first three weeks sprint placed a focus on sharing existing good practices as you would expect at the beginning of a process, we're sharing what we already do. Each day was structured to encourage collaborative active play and creative thinking in relationship to our expanding notion of student experience in HE. So the sprints were rooted in the sharing of knowledge and the expertise across the vast range of academic and technical staff, research professors, professors, students and industry partners via a series of activities. The curriculum in the end was constructed, it was animated, it was gamified, this became known as the lens of perception and it was performed and it's an articulated in a way that signals our school's core disciplines and those disciplines were given to us actually prior to the development of the school and they are creativity, you may imagine, collaboration, absolutely key and practical and through practical we mean technological application. A key driver for the design of the new curriculum was meaningful engagement with the digital and creative sectors. The landscape of these industries as you probably know is changing and digital companies are increasingly failing to recognise traditional disciplinary boundaries and are instead focusing on attracting young creatives who are flexible and adaptable and able to learn independently and contribute directly to or even maybe disrupt the companies that they work for. In terms of designing the curriculum that's not only responsive but is impactful to change our challenge is focused on how we as academics and tutors on the one hand recognise subject disciplinarity but at the same time avoid siloing our students into specialisms, it's a really difficult thing to do navigating that boundary between specialism and multidisciplinarity. The aim through the curriculum design sprints was to establish a refreshed ethos to learning and teaching environment we occupy with our students to celebrate the collaborative act by encouraging our students to discover their individual creativity within a team and value the skills of sharing knowledge, imagination, expertise and experience with others. We felt that being open to new ways of learning and communicating with our peers would inevitably lead to fostering a collective voice to alternative approaches to telling stories through digital technologies. As one of our graduating filmmaking students puts it, intersections between audience participants and me the filmmaker sharing the authorship and sharing creative stories. So the collective self is a living evolving archive capturing fleeting moments thoughts and feelings of women all over the world. The archive currently contains 800 thoughts from 67 women in 20 different countries and the process of making this project only took three months but my research journey has been a lot longer than that and it started off with a frustration with the linear film format and more specifically with the ethical shortcomings of being a documentary filmmaker. I began to question authorship and the power and the control that I had to kind of manipulate other people's stories. Why I wanted to create was a more open and inclusive practice. I was making films with people and not about them. Well the web app was used to kind of capture the thoughts and so anyone can participate. You only need a phone, the internet and be willing to share your thoughts to take part. So any woman could partake in any country and that was really important to me to kind of have it to be as accessible and open as possible. I knew I had to have some kind of ordering logic to this archive so when I made the web app I also created a second question. The first question was what are you thinking right now and the second was what are you feeling right now? So then I had eight different emotions that the participants themselves categorised where their thought belonged. So that was my kind of the order of the archive and I created a control panel on the iPad to kind of so the audience was allowed to kind of interact with the project and create their own meaning and take whatever they want out of it by inviting the audience in to engage with it in a different way and interact with the material that allows for more engagement. You're given an opportunity to kind of select for yourself and control the work yourself and it becomes this kind of intersection between audience, participants and me sharing the authorship and sharing and creating stories. Okay so the Victoria's approach there about making films with people rather than about them breaks down kind of boundaries of authorship opening up shared space for creative storytelling thus giving the participant a voice. This can be quite a challenge for young creative students but once experienced as you can see with Victoria hierarchical structures are challenged in interesting and dynamic ways. A diversity of voices can be heard and new approaches to storytelling emerge when the director examines and alters their role within the partnership and with others. This leads to our strategy to develop a curriculum that's vertical and by vertical we mean where knowledge skills and expertise are shared across educational levels across subject divides and across academic research technical support industry populations communities and our students that our students engage with. This inspires an approach to learning that's driven by the needs of the research community we aim to create and the open culture of cooperation that we define in our curriculum model. The curriculum we have the ambition to design and deliver is one where participants provide the key driver for the curriculum as disciplines become more permeable as the levels progress we increasingly encourage our students with different specialisms to work together on projects learning from each other and sharing their knowledge and expertise. Such a curriculum will enable students to work with research colleagues on projects as well as with industry partners and nonprofit making charities and societal projects. Some of the work as we've already begun in the media department I don't have time to tell you about those right now but here they are narratives of homelessness project that we're doing a visualizing radio where students have made 30 second animations about radio and talent lab which is something that we do annually where we get students to work with industry. Expectation is such that a model will benefit everybody and in particular our students who will receive direct experience through working with real projects with a range of people and a breadth of experience and therefore develop their skills as critical practitioners. One of the key things in working on this project was to work directly with industry very intimately actually with industry and to get them involved in what we're doing and one of the things that came out of that or a number of things that came out of that a number of kind of learning things that came from engaging with a relatively new creative digital sector. The first was that the younger the company is the smaller it is I should say and less hierarchical it tends to be you know hierarchy tends to be limited to to larger companies. Technology is intrinsic in the business it's not the key driver for them. They seek new talent they want creative thinkers they want makers with fresh ideas and approaches to get an edge on their competition. They're more accepting of failure interestingly and they are enthusiastic about collaborating with the school to further their own learning as individuals and as businesses. Another key strategy another key strategy curriculum strategy is to fully integrate our technical expertise now like in most institutions our technical services is again siloed it's in a different part of the university and as I'm sure you all come across this you know I'm talking about siloing students but all our services are siloed so we're trying to create a space where we can bring all of those all of that expertise together within one creative digital space. I'm running out of time but I just want to finish by saying the idea is to create a community of digital practice that makes best use of the staff and student expertise. It breaks down the barriers and the hierarchies of traditional defined educational roles and to consider the student-teacher relationship and the creative space for open dialogue that crosses a multitude of expertise in our universities in our schools and in our communities. I have to stop there because I've run out of time I think. So thank you very much and I'm really very interested in hearing from you. There's my email address please do contact me. We want you involved in what we're doing in building this new school. Thank you. Thank you Pa. Any questions in the audience? There's roving microphones so if you have a question no question sofa. There's an online question. Do industry partners contribute to the curriculum development process? Yes very very much so they were involved in the curriculum design sprints that we were doing and they were encouraged to be involved in other activities that we engaged them in. You probably realise that getting industry to give up time to come into the university or even give up time when we go out to them is quite difficult process but however we you know the industries that we contacted that we have partnerships with they're really keen in getting involved with what we're doing because they see it as a space that they can use they see it as a resource for them so it's an experimental space and a risk taking space as well. Questions in the audience? Okay no thank you Pa. Thank you. to machine learning and smart campus technology.