Education

It’s quiet here at the OCA offices today. Gareth and I got back to Sheffield late last night after a long, long day. We were meeting with the University for the Creative Arts to validate our MA in Fine Art. First of all UCA had to satisfy themselves that they wanted to partner with...
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The Open College of the Arts works with the Prisoners’ Education Trust to enable students in prison to access our courses. It is an important part of our charitable purpose and student fees are met by a combination of OCA bursaries and grants from the Trust. As this work is largely invisible to other...
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Blog of the week this month is southliving written by China based OCA photography student Dewald Botha. And written is the operative word, one of the defining features of Dewald’s learning blog is the way that he sets out so clearly his thinking about his work – both in advance of shooting and then...
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For blog of the week this month we look to Gesa Helms’ pain and the pastoral. This is not so much a OCA learning log as an artist’s reflective notebook and it is fascinating for it. Rather than polished mini-articles we get snippets of thoughts and associations. Many of these thoughts turn to colour,...
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The OCA is working hard on designing an MA and hopes to launch it in January 2011. This is an exciting new venture for OCA and we anticipate significant interest in it, judging on the feedback we have had from the students we have asked. The programme will be different from existing...
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The Business Design Centre in Islington is a great venue for designers to show their flair, with 65,000 square feet, a graceful iron arch originally designed as the Royal Agricultural Hall, opened in 1862. Now a thriving conference centre, the venue has, for the last couple of weeks, been jammed with creative young people,...
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Saturday morning saw me at the Tate Modern with a small group of OCA students to visit the exhibition Exposure: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera. It was a real pleasure to meet a group of students, get their perspectives on the work displayed and get a sense of their experience of studying with the...
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Blog of the week this month is Marmalade Cafe written and photographed by Penny Watson. Penny enrolled on Art of Photography last year and was encouraged by her tutor to make an APEL application (Accreditation of Prior Experiential Learning – where you assemble a portfolio of work and a personal statement). The application was...
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I had a meeting at Bucks New University recently and visited the degree show in Furniture design (a real strength), Textiles Surface Design and Fine Art. Fine Art was really stimulating. It really struck me how useful it would be for OCA students, if at all possible, to get along to any...
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OCA is going to be further developing its curriculum in the next 12 months, and there are some exciting new additions to the existing suite as well as a couple of exciting additions to our undergraduate degree programmes. First, there is a new Textiles course at level 1 (HE4) coming in the next few weeks...
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