Course units
The course starts with Unit 1: Researching Arts and Cultural Enterprise, in which you are introduced to key concepts of cultural production as well as the research, writing, analysis and evaluation skills essential for postgraduate study. You begin to work together as a group, learning to negotiate, agree ground rules, communicate and share ideas and, importantly, learn how to approach and resolve difficulty and conflict.
Unit 2: Practice, Policy and Markets engages you in the macro analysis of the realm of cultural and artistic production and dissemination. It enables you to develop an understanding of cultural production in both the commercial and the public realms.
Unit 3: Contexts – Local and Global Challenges looks at the impact of contemporary values and discourses on the future. It interrogates globalisation as a challenge as well as an opportunity, and facilitates an understanding of enterprise in uncertain contexts.
In Unit 4: Arts Entrepreneurship, you explore the ways in which creativity, innovation, problem solving and entrepreneurship intersect. It employs real-world examples to enable you to think about business model innovation, new markets, new experiences and services, new ways of communication and new organisational models.
Unit 5: Business Models and Planning is the core business unit of the course. It introduces you to the basics of general business processes and developing strategies around short and longer-term challenges. Teaching includes theoretical approaches, and case-study-based learning.
Unit 6: Focus: Social Impact and Innovation engages with the overarching principles of social responsibility, ethical behaviours, social innovation and theories of socially-engaged practices, and challenges you to form an understanding of how cultural events and activities can support engagement with innovation and innovative practices.
Unit 7: Dissertation or live project is the final, Masters-specific 60-credit unit, which enables you to reflect critically on theories and critical skills encountered previously in the course, while proposing new approaches to cultural production, in a self-directed dissertation or major project. The dissertation is an individual academic study, based on models and theories discussed throughout the course; the live project puts strategies of cultural production into practice. This unit culminates in you working together to organise an online intervention.
Important note concerning academic progression through your course:
If you are required to retake a unit you will need to cease further study on the course until you have passed the unit concerned. Once you have successfully passed this unit, you will be able to proceed onto the next unit. Retaking a unit might require you to take time out of study, which could affect other things such as student loans or the visa status for international students.
Mode of Study
The course is offered in both two-year part-time, and flexible learning modes.
Part-time mode over two years: this means that, to achieve the Masters qualification in part-time mode, your learning is timetabled across 83 weeks over two full calendar years. To achieve the PG Cert takes 27 weeks’ study, over around an 8-month period, and for the PG Dip, it takes 54 weeks’ study, over around a 16-month period. Both PG Cert and PG Dip are offered as an exit award only.
Flexible learning mode (London cohort only): in this mode, individual units can be undertaken over a maximum five-year registration period. Unit 1 is compulsory and must be taken as the initial unit. Units 2 to 6 can be taken in any order thereafter. Unit 7 can be undertaken only when units one to six have been passed.
You are expected to commit an average of around 22 hours per week to your studies. Taught input is offered through intensive face-to-face teaching and learning activities on site near the beginning of each unit, and continues in the form of synchronous and asynchronous online teaching, support and feedback via Moodle (the University’s Virtual Learning Environment) throughout the remainder of the unit.
The course has been designed in this way to enable you to pursue your studies whilst also undertaking part-time employment, internships or care responsibilities. Your calendar for each unit is available on Moodle, and week-by-week timetable information is updated on a continuing basis.
Credit and award requirements
The course is credit-rated at 180 credits.
On successfully completing the course, you will gain a Master of Arts (MA degree).
Under the Framework for Higher Education Qualifications, an MA is Level 7. All units must be passed in order to achieve the MA but the classification of the award is derived from the mark for the final unit only.
If you are unable to continue on the course, a Postgraduate Certificate (PG Cert) will normally be offered following the successful completion of 60 credits, or a Postgraduate Diploma (PG Dip) following the successful completion of 120 credits.
In either mode, the MA award is based solely on the achievement in Unit 7.