Learning at a distance
I spent the day today working at home with my colleague Jez Collins and after a lot of planning, writing and brainstorming, we had a Skype meeting with Professor Tim Wall to talk about (among other things) the ongoing development of Masters programmes at Birmingham City University.
I’m already the award leader on an MA in Music Industries, and our first intake was in February. We’re recruiting for the September intake now.
It’s been going really well, and we have a small but really engaged group of music industry postrgrad students who are doing great work in Popular Music as Culture and a module in Enterprise. You can check out the students’ work at their blog.
Today we looked at two new developments for next semester’s intake – one definite, and one likely. The first of those is the MA in Music Radio. As far as I know there is no such Masters degree in the UK, focusing specifically on music radio. It’ll be great to bring some of the elements of music programming into the mix, as well as get the students working on practical projects and academic work in this area.
My colleague Sam Coley and a couple of our third year undergraduate students are shortlsted for a Sony Radio Award for a programme they made about the 30th anniversary of UB40’s Signing Off album, and Sam has been making a series for XFM recently, celebrating the 25th anniversary of classic albums. A great series to listen to… and a great person to have around when you’re delivering a course like this.
The other development – and it’s not finalised, but we’re working on it – is the Distance Learning version of the MA in Music Industries. We’re looking at developing a new module specifically in Online Music Enterprise as part of that distance learning course, and I think I’m right in saying it would be the first Music Industry MA to be delivered online. Given my set of interests, you can probably imagine how pleased I am to be involved in putting that together…
I’ve had feedback from quite a few people saying they’d love to do the MA in Music Industries, but they can’t move to Birmingham to do the course for whatever reason. Well – if all this goes to plan, we may just be within sight of solving that particular problem.
Exciting times…
