Case studies: Beyond the Campus
Hyper Island: Globally distributed learning through a collaborative MA in Digital Project Management
Hyper Island is a global-run Creative Higher Education business that distributes industry-based digital communications learning across 4 different countries from Sweden where the company was founded, to Manchester, New York and most recently Singapore.
We have talked to Jim Ralley about the implications of managing a globally distributed network of students and professionals and how the organisation adapts to constant change in the world of digital technologies. What was the aim behind establishing Hyper Island? Hyper Island started in an old naval prison in Southern Sweden in a place called Karlskrona. Three professionals, who worked in the marketing and communications industry, set it up. They observed a lot of creative graduates coming out of creative courses at university, who weren’t ready for the world of creative work. They hadn’t been trained in a way that employers want them to be trained. They also couldn’t work effectively in teams and didn’t lead their own learning. The school was set up to combat this problem proactively and in this it was very successfil. In the 90s they set up another school in Stockholm in the old Ericcson building – the old mobile phone manufacturing site. And two years ago we opened a school in Manchester and ran a programme funded by Nesta called ‘Interactive media and design management’ which was tweaked to become the MA in Digital Media management this year. Very recently we opened a school in Singapore and they are running the MA parallel to us in Manchester, obviously 8 hours ahead. |
Related case studies
Presentation & PodcastListen to Jim Ralley, Programme Manager at Hyper Island who presented at our First Workshop in Manchester – or download his presentation: Distributed global learning networks MA in digital/cultural project management
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What is your learning methodology?
How do we do what we do? We are actually a higher education company rather than an institution offering experience based learning – so to speak a kind of constructivist pedagogy almost. We challenge our students into doing things before bringing any learning content to them. This is pure learning by doing, which is a very much reflective practice. We facilitate reflection sections after our students obtain the actual experience. They tease out what they’ve learned from it and how they can apply this in future. We work with them on effective feedback by giving and receiving feedback as an organic process. There is a lot of pastoral and one-to-one support that we engage in. Our courses are crucially designed by the media, marketing and communications industry. And then we also work with students from previous years to redesign courses as well. And of course we have some say in what we deliver. The students tend to work on a project basis with real clients. So our goal is to provide an experience as close to the real world as possible. You can say: It is delivered by the industry. There are no teachers at Hyper Island who delivers any content. All the content is delivered by people who we get in through the industry. This insures that the subjects our students study are completely relevant and contemporary.
We work in a digital world so everything is constantly changing, so we have to change what we deliver in response to the student’s needs or the needs of the industry. Therefore our curriculum is constantly in flux. We often analyse and improve group dynamics as a methodology that we focus our work around. We are entirely process oriented. We think as much about how we work as well as what we deliver, which also focuses a lot on personal development. Our graduates leave as self-leading learners and that’s what we would like them to be. They become better and cleverer people!
How do we do what we do? We are actually a higher education company rather than an institution offering experience based learning – so to speak a kind of constructivist pedagogy almost. We challenge our students into doing things before bringing any learning content to them. This is pure learning by doing, which is a very much reflective practice. We facilitate reflection sections after our students obtain the actual experience. They tease out what they’ve learned from it and how they can apply this in future. We work with them on effective feedback by giving and receiving feedback as an organic process. There is a lot of pastoral and one-to-one support that we engage in. Our courses are crucially designed by the media, marketing and communications industry. And then we also work with students from previous years to redesign courses as well. And of course we have some say in what we deliver. The students tend to work on a project basis with real clients. So our goal is to provide an experience as close to the real world as possible. You can say: It is delivered by the industry. There are no teachers at Hyper Island who delivers any content. All the content is delivered by people who we get in through the industry. This insures that the subjects our students study are completely relevant and contemporary.
We work in a digital world so everything is constantly changing, so we have to change what we deliver in response to the student’s needs or the needs of the industry. Therefore our curriculum is constantly in flux. We often analyse and improve group dynamics as a methodology that we focus our work around. We are entirely process oriented. We think as much about how we work as well as what we deliver, which also focuses a lot on personal development. Our graduates leave as self-leading learners and that’s what we would like them to be. They become better and cleverer people!
What do you do as a programme manager? How are you involved in the development of the MA course?
We are all learning design! I am designing the next years of the course, which means curating the learning journey that we will take the students on. I most importantly facilitate the reflection process, but I don’t deliver content and I’m not a teacher as such. In my role as programI document all the things you have to do on a normal MA such as the assessment process. I also supervise corporate professional development work with agencies in the industry, which is the other part of our business. We develop strong learning partnerships because all our courses are run by the industry. In fact they are central to our business model and what gives us our competitive advantage. With project management we try to make is as real world as possible and of course evaluation and iteration and redesigning the course. What I don’t do is teaching or grading work as we have external assessors to do that. The learning process matters!
How is the MA Digital Media Management structured?
Our students are 24 weeks in school for approx. 40 hours a week plus weekends because they are working on projects, which can be really intense. Additionally they are enrolled in a 12-weeks work-based research project through an internship which often forms the basis of their dissertation. Learning is delivered as integrated group projects of individual research. There are 6 ingoing projects and each group has to develop an individual research angle. Our formative assessment toolkit is based on industry feedback and discussion groups. The course however is accredited by Teesside University through the School of Arts and Media, which is one of the best universities in the country for that.
As I said all the briefs for our projects are delivered through learning partnerships that we develop. And these learning partners pay us to have our students work on briefs for them. We receive no public funding whatsoever. All our courses are funded through student fees and through the aforesaid learning partnerships. For example some of our students have worked with world class brands such as Google, BBC, Greenpeace and Mozilla. We also do some graphics for the Guardian, the Post Office and loads more.
What is globally distributed learning? What kind of challenges does it bring along?
Unlike most of the other universities in the world that are building or campus based, we have 4 different schools all over the world trying to deliver a unified offer to all our students. What I think this gives us is a real world situation. We are trying to train our students to work in the marketing and communications industry and within the creative sector, having to deal with time differences and frustrating skype pitches or meetings. It is about the communications across geographies, which is a real world problem. It gives us the opportunity to run 24 hour global projects. As I said we are running the MA with our Singapore school simultaneously, so we facilitate big projects with companies in the east and in the west. This is really exciting and cost-effective. Instead of flying in a speaker, we often just video record talks and seminars and ask our students in Manchester to watch the video. This saves us a lot of money. It gives us a competitive advantage I think because we have a wider geographical and cultural offer. But is also presents tons of challenges being split across 4 different countries with an office in New York as well.
One of the biggest issues is to develop an infrastructure that supports this global reach. This also includes communicate with people you’ve never met and develop a curriculum together. Since things are constantly changing, we also constantly need to confront change in the organisation. Another challenge is to monitor the quality of our work especially as you expand operations to a lot of different places. How do you keep the quality and how do you present this unified offer? We have many highly trained facilitators who we have to bring from Sweden to the UK, to New York and to Singapore. This can become very expensive. We’ve got a really international student cohort at all our schools, so that’s something we have to deal with. It is a challenge but a real benefit too that we engage with daily.
With all the new technologies changes there is absolutely now way for predicting their future implications. This is exactly the interface at which we want to lead change.
(edited by Silvie Jacobi)
We are all learning design! I am designing the next years of the course, which means curating the learning journey that we will take the students on. I most importantly facilitate the reflection process, but I don’t deliver content and I’m not a teacher as such. In my role as programI document all the things you have to do on a normal MA such as the assessment process. I also supervise corporate professional development work with agencies in the industry, which is the other part of our business. We develop strong learning partnerships because all our courses are run by the industry. In fact they are central to our business model and what gives us our competitive advantage. With project management we try to make is as real world as possible and of course evaluation and iteration and redesigning the course. What I don’t do is teaching or grading work as we have external assessors to do that. The learning process matters!
How is the MA Digital Media Management structured?
Our students are 24 weeks in school for approx. 40 hours a week plus weekends because they are working on projects, which can be really intense. Additionally they are enrolled in a 12-weeks work-based research project through an internship which often forms the basis of their dissertation. Learning is delivered as integrated group projects of individual research. There are 6 ingoing projects and each group has to develop an individual research angle. Our formative assessment toolkit is based on industry feedback and discussion groups. The course however is accredited by Teesside University through the School of Arts and Media, which is one of the best universities in the country for that.
As I said all the briefs for our projects are delivered through learning partnerships that we develop. And these learning partners pay us to have our students work on briefs for them. We receive no public funding whatsoever. All our courses are funded through student fees and through the aforesaid learning partnerships. For example some of our students have worked with world class brands such as Google, BBC, Greenpeace and Mozilla. We also do some graphics for the Guardian, the Post Office and loads more.
What is globally distributed learning? What kind of challenges does it bring along?
Unlike most of the other universities in the world that are building or campus based, we have 4 different schools all over the world trying to deliver a unified offer to all our students. What I think this gives us is a real world situation. We are trying to train our students to work in the marketing and communications industry and within the creative sector, having to deal with time differences and frustrating skype pitches or meetings. It is about the communications across geographies, which is a real world problem. It gives us the opportunity to run 24 hour global projects. As I said we are running the MA with our Singapore school simultaneously, so we facilitate big projects with companies in the east and in the west. This is really exciting and cost-effective. Instead of flying in a speaker, we often just video record talks and seminars and ask our students in Manchester to watch the video. This saves us a lot of money. It gives us a competitive advantage I think because we have a wider geographical and cultural offer. But is also presents tons of challenges being split across 4 different countries with an office in New York as well.
One of the biggest issues is to develop an infrastructure that supports this global reach. This also includes communicate with people you’ve never met and develop a curriculum together. Since things are constantly changing, we also constantly need to confront change in the organisation. Another challenge is to monitor the quality of our work especially as you expand operations to a lot of different places. How do you keep the quality and how do you present this unified offer? We have many highly trained facilitators who we have to bring from Sweden to the UK, to New York and to Singapore. This can become very expensive. We’ve got a really international student cohort at all our schools, so that’s something we have to deal with. It is a challenge but a real benefit too that we engage with daily.
With all the new technologies changes there is absolutely now way for predicting their future implications. This is exactly the interface at which we want to lead change.
(edited by Silvie Jacobi)