Notes for essay work!

In my personal tutorial Mark and I spoke about basing my essay about what University’s need to offer new students to get them to join the course, and why schools in general need to enhance creativity. 

I then decided between two questions ‘What uni’s need to start offering to get new students?’ or ‘Why it is important to enhance creativity in education?’. I decided to choose the first question because I felt that I would be able to write more about that topic, and I feel more strongly about it. 

Intro

I am going to start the essay by outlining my reasons to go to uni and what I expected from the course (To learn, what software to use). Some issues that I found once I came to uni and started the course. Then go into my opinions on what uni’s should do then. 

Research

Research into what other people wanted out of uni. Old tech innovations and new ones. Tech we could possibly learn (that would be useful) on our course, it could be that they are currently too expensive for the uni to justify. 

Research list:

-      What people expect from uni (People of different age ranges and courses)

-      Old tech (Film editing, etc.)

-      Laptops and apps (Easy access to new technology)

-      New tech we could learn (VR, AR, new apps, new software, sound)

How everything went from a big bulky expensive piece of tech to a laptop. For instance, the process of editing films. 

I then asked my sister Francesca about her experiences at university, she studied ‘Illustration and Visual Communication’ at Westminster university in 2014, her course focused mainly on drawing, painting, advertising, graphics, branding and animation among other things.  I first asked her what she expected from university before she went, and she answered, ‘A qualification in the full Adobe suite’ as well as in-depth information on how to professionally use each software. ‘Constructive criticism’ from her tutors, which she found she did not receive enough of once she got there. ‘Use of Wacom tablets’, which were provided once she got there, however you would have to go through a lecture before being allowed to hire them out. ‘Learning how to use software and hardware from the professional creative sector’, she found that not all the software that she thought would be vital to careers after this course were taught, although some were. ‘Work experience and snippets of the real world’, so learning about what the actual job is going to be like, instead of learning about the topic, she found that they did not get this except from talks from other artists or competitions they had to compete in for the course. ‘Not just sitting in a room and instead showing what you’re doing in the real world’ she found that the lessons that most interested her were the ones where professionals would come in and speak to them about what their job entailed and what they had done to get that job, as it meant she was learning about things in the real world instead of from books. 

I also asked my sisters partner about his experiences at university, as he did a non-creative subject and did his course a couple years before my sister did, so I wanted to see what someone from a different time and course style thought about their experiences. Sean studied one year of sports science in 2007, and then did three years of physiotherapy in 2008, at York St. Johns University. Before he went to university he expected it to be similar to ‘the American version’ of university and have the lessons to be in an ‘amphitheatre’ with more ‘lecture’ based lessons. However, once he got there he found that it was more ‘school like’ than he expected. He said that he much preferred ‘Physiotherapy’ as it was more vocational styled, due to it being for a specific job, instead of a general area of work, also that it ‘painted a picture’ of what the job would actually be like. He also thought that most university courses are now ‘non-applicable’ to real life jobs, as they just teach you how to do something through books and lectures instead of doing, and that the courses should be more like apprenticeships, as it gives the students more of a realistic idea of what the job is going to be like.