My name is Professor Paul Gough. I'm the vice chancellor at Arts University Bournemouth.
What AUB online is going to do and is doing already is provide a top notch experience for our students across a whole range of subjects.
I've been looking very closely at the content, the curriculum, the syllabus of each of the courses, and I'm just really impressed. I'm impressed by what's what's expected of our students, what will be delivered by the staff, and the sense of community that will come out of being on AUB online.
I mean, studying online is interesting because for many students, they'll think this is so different from anything I've had before. And yet, in my previous role, when I was working the other side of the world, it was amazing when we built almost built a whole university online, how students, often mid profession, often mid career, will come back to online learning to upskill, to update, and to learn a whole range of new skills, but also with a different sort of community. And what really surprises me, and often surprises people who don't think it can happen, is you can create a community of learners online all over the world. And that sense of belonging online and belonging to the course and belonging to AUB's learning, I think, is one of the most impressive things about being on an online course.
Nearly all of the arts are interdisciplinary.
They need to derive their energy, their idea, their aesthetics from looking across at other activity, whether it's in design, whether in media, whether in landscape studies, you name it. It's necessarily interdependent on other activities.
So at AUB online, you'd be finding that the work you're doing, which might be around film, or it might be around landscape, or it might be around interiors, or it might be of any of the courses, but I guarantee that the learning will draw upon a whole range of theory, of practice, of historical context. So that's how we encourage interdisciplinarity because there isn't really a single discipline. There are many, and they all matter to the core of what you're trying to do.
When I started here as vice chancellor, one of the first things I did in in building the strategy document was to concentrate on values.
Values that would bring us together and that we would hold us to to account really on our behaviours.
And I think the the the danger is with values is they just become the big words, the high diction of an organization. But for me, we live those values every day. We talk about collaboration, about connectedness, about being inclusive. But the one that really chimed with the staff and with our stakeholders and certainly with our students is this notion of passion. Passion for your subject, for your discipline, and for learning. And so the four values we have drive the organization. They're at the heart of what we do, and they matter hugely to our students.
.png)
