Creative Media and Visual Communication (Top-Up)

The award provides a progression route for the foundation degrees and HNDs within the network. The award is designed to place students at the heart of their own learning, enabling them to become autonomous thinkers, learners and creative practitioners and taking ownership of their own practice. It is envisaged that students will produce a high quality focused portfolio of work by the end of year. The students will be supported throughout by staff with extensive knowledge within their chosen specialism. This course will enable creative media and visual communication practitioners to become critically reflective by developing skills of enquiry, analysis and synthesis, questioning and confronting the internal and external forces which provide the context for their work. To enable students to take a critical perspective on both current practice and likely future developments within creative media and visual communication the course aims to develop highly employable practitioners with a creative vision and key attributes that include, responsiveness, flexibility and resilience. The award will offer a range of individual and collaborative experiences, enabling students to develop further their technical and craft skills towards industry readiness through intellectually challenging, industry facing creative assignments initially. By the mid-point in this final year of undergraduate study, students will have appropriate theoretical understanding; intellectual and technical skills together with the mature personal vision necessary to propose, develop and deliver a substantive, major piece of work within their creative discipline. Tutorial and one-to-one support (alongside promoted peer to peer discourse) shifts towards facilitation and critique in order to challenge students to be critically reflective and thus able to substantiate argument. This refinement and consolidation of higher level skills will bring together each student’s understanding of their own creative skills and technical ability and aims to foster the necessary confidence and self-management ability to sustain a career in the creative industries at a variety of levels. Study and professionalism are supported and referenced against throughout, via engagement with a series of guest lecturers and workshops delivered by industry professionals.