Reinventing university education
Written 08.12.04 by: Jonathan Briggs
In 1996, the Swedish government, seeking to find ways of extending higher level courses to more people, offered private companies the opportunity to fill in the gaps. They were particularly looking for new courses that would tackle the emerging technologies.
Hyper Island was the result of a collaboration between two Swedish multimedia producers – David Erixon and Lars Lundh - and the OTHER media. Jonathan Briggs from the OTHER media was already involved with teaching in a university in the UK; a traditional university with familiar subject boundaries, examinations and teaching models. Together with others from the OTHER media they planned a new type of course and a new mode of study that would take the best of the traditional and blend it with cross-discipline thinking and project focussed learning. In this the development team were highly influenced by Fabrica in Italy and Space Invaders in Copenhagen already renowned for their private design and project management courses.
At the heart of Hyper Island is a building. It is a disused naval prison from 1860 and was found and renovated by Lars Lundh in 1996. It remains a historic monument and local museum staff monitored renovations. The building is full of character and immediately allowed both staff and students to create a strong sense of ownership and personality.
At the centre of the course are a number of principles: project centred learning, teamwork, industry involvement and interdisciplinary thinking. Instead of a fixed curriculum, the course revolves around a set of projects. Each project will introduce a number of core ideas or build upon those in earlier units. A group will tackle each project, with group members taking different roles and using and acquiring various skills. To guide and stimulate activity, external experts are invited to present to the students and these are drawn both from the new media industry and well beyond and have included architects, furniture designers, town planners and the police. The aim is to enlarge rather than narrow problem solving and creativity and to get students thinking "out of the box".
This lateral thinking is exactly what new media designers need in work whether they are visualising a user interface or writing the business plan for a start-up (and we would expect all Hyper Island graduates to tackle both).
The course still has a strong academic component with students encouraged to write, research and defend their ideas. They are also expected to develop critical skills and to support each other in their learning. It is this support by a "community of learners" that characterises the School’s philosophy and this support does not end when students leave. During the course’s industrial training period in industry and after graduation students remain part of this community and this is most noticeable in the amount of daily communication they are involved in.
The day-to-day operation of the School is run by a very small staff whose priority, perhaps surprisingly, is to manage the team building and the group work, rather than to teach the technology, the business or the graphical tools and techniques. This subject based teaching is facilitated from outside by lecturers from both industry and academia but almost all of the responsibility for learning is placed squarely in the hands of the students. While this is initially very unfamiliar and often leads to argument and debate, each set of learners has responded by building a tightly knit cohort of highly confident and perhaps even arrogant individuals who have planned events, sought additional sponsorship, invited international speakers and defined their own extra projects.
Hyper Island was designed by a group of people who wanted to create an exciting, challenging and productive learning environment but it was also designed to address directly the needs of the emerging new media industry. Traditional courses in computer science, graphic design and business all produce people who are too narrowly focussed. Potentially they may be highly skilled in this or that tool, or be able to harness traditional design or business thinking but today’s new businesses need people who can look beyond their subject and help build links between widely diverse areas of knowledge. In all the constituent disciplines there is an urgent need to create people who can communicate with professionals outside their area and who can keep up with change.
Most new media education focuses on producing graphic designers or programmers. Hyper Island aims to train "producers" who have a good understanding of both software and design but whose main role when they start working is to pull a team together and work with clients to deliver what they need. The response from potential and actual employers has been incredible.
During the course students spend 20 weeks working for a new media company before returning to the School to complete their exam work. From the very first cohort, it was clear that students had very clear opinions about where they wanted to go, with students targeting all the major agencies across the world. Now, after five groups of students, Hyper Island has placed students with companies large and small in San Francisco, Los Angeles, London, New York, Oslo, Copenhagen, Madrid as well as Stockholm, Malmo and other Swedish cities. For many, this relationship has turned into a permanent job and Hyper Island graduates now form a network for exchanging ideas across the industry. These ideas, in turn, feed in to what current students are taught as companies queue up to teach at the School and students exchange ideas via the Internet on a daily basis.
This "network" is one of the unexpected results. It was not planned. As many businesses discover the main importance of the internet is not simply about marketing but about opening up two-way communication with customers, suppliers and employees. The same is true in education - allowing students (and experts) to communicate opens up new possibilities for collaboration and new ways of exploring ideas. Technical problems are immediately shared and solved, even perhaps by a traditional competitor. Ideas are sketched and available for comment and review. This is one of the real opportunities for distance learning but many universities faced with the technology are rushing to "put their course material on line" rather than recognising that the real strength, as demonstrated by Hyper Island, is supporting and extending an established learning community – one that has been formed through close contact and mutual problem solving and is maintained by daily or weekly contact using the complete range of technology.
Hyper Island is a school that is about the new technology but has also been defined and shaped by the new technology. The familiarity of a curriculum has been replaced by the chaos of constant change. Instead of a fixed period of study, participation extends out into their working lives. For those of us in new media helping companies understand and harness the Internet, WAP and broadband technologies, these types of transformations are familiar. Hyper Island is only one way of experimenting with the formats of higher education and as with business models many more experiments will be needed to train the flexible and imaginative knowledge workers that we need.