Staff Experiences

UWL’s teaching and learning in the creative industries project recognised with Accelerator Award

Dr Dennis Olsen and Mark Owen at the London School of Film, Media and Design have been presented with an Accelerator Award for their collaborative research exploring visualisation strategies for teaching and learning in the creative industries. The accolade was awarded by BW Baden-Wuerttemberg, which represents a variety of German SMEs from the creative industries, for their “innovative project that reflects the current need for rethinking the ways we educate our next generation creatives” (BW). 

Dr Olsen, a specialist for Advertising and Branding, summarises the multi-disciplinary project:

“With a new generation of students now populating lecture halls, seminar rooms and workshop facilities at universities, changes in learning preferences have become apparent to those involved in Higher Education. The new students have largely grown up with an omnipresence of audio-visual technology and appear to have a distinct hunger for visual communication—both in their day-to-day lives and in formal and informal learning settings. Our project focuses on Gen Z as the new primary target audience for teaching and learning in Higher Education and explores ways as to how visual communication might be utilised to increase student engagement inside and outside of the classroom. We are still at an early stage, but the Accelerator Award grant will surely boost our progress.” 

The newly commended research project expands on Dr Olsen’s pedagogical research into learning videos within the creative industries, which he conducted as part of his PgCert in Academic Practice at UWL in 2019, and which won first prize at the Festival of Teaching and Learning the same year.  

The monies attached to the Accelerator Award will be used for prototyping of visual artefacts, before the project enters its empirical stage in 2020. 

For further information, please contact the project lead Dr Dennis Olsen: dennis.olsen@uwl.ac.uk