Accelerate
Accessible Immersive Learning for Art and Design
The Erasmus+ funded ‘Strategic Partnership’ project, ‘ACCELERATE: Accessible Immersive Learning for Art and Design’; coordinated by Bath Spa University and run in collaboration with the five other European Institutions listed below, began in June 2021 and will run for two years.
The project provides a fantastic and timely opportunity for art and design lecturers, educational researchers and learning technologists from across the continent to reflect on the impact of Covid-19 on higher education teaching, and to explore new possibilities for pedagogy and digital innovation.
Project aims
ACCELERATE has a simple but ambitious aim: to improve the teaching of art and design at higher education in a post-pandemic Europe through the development of innovative methodologies, tools, platforms and resources for accessible immersive learning.
The project will bring together art and design lecturers, educational researchers, and learning technologists from the UK, Ireland, Poland and Ukraine to reflect on the impact of COVID-19 and to explore new possibilities for pedagogy and digital innovation.
ACCELERATE will draw on the spirit of practice-led creative innovation that art and design lecturers have been invoking since March 2020 and will focus on the potential transformative role of immersive technologies (that is, augmented, virtual and mixed realities, also known as extended reality (XR)) in the teaching of art and design, while recognising that many learners face significant challenges in engaging effectively with XR technologies: disabilities; complex personal circumstances; low quality devices; poor and unreliable internet access.
Year one achievements
- Kick Off Meeting, Bath, February 2022
- Accessible Pedagogies Training, Bath, February 2022
- Immersive Technologies Training, London, June 2022
- Diagnostic Survey Report
- Selection of Accessible Learning Student Ambassadors
Bath Spa contact details
- Project Coordinator: Professor Ian Gadd, Head of Development of European Projects: accelerate@bathspa.ac.uk
- Academic Lead: Jenny Dunseath, Reader in Art: j.dunseath@bathspa.ac.uk
Credit: photograph courtesy of UCL