The Department of Media was part of Coventry School of Art and Design in Coventry University but is now known as the School of Media and Performing Arts in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities. It is located within the Ellen Terry Building, which is a £7 million refurbished 1930s cinema in the centre of Coventry, UK. Its courses include undergraduate degrees in Digital Media, Journalism, Media Production, Photography, Media and Communications, Music, Music Technology and Theatre and Professional Practice,. It has masters level degrees in Communication, Culture and Media, Automotive Journalism, Global Journalism and PR, 21st Century Media Production, Collaborative Theatre Making and Dance Theatre.
Research, impact and recognition
The school undertakes research in the fields of Media and Communication contributing to debates at local, national and international level. This includes major projects funded by Jisc, the AHRC, HEFCE as well as a number of industry and charitable partners. The department goes back to 1975, when It was among the first places to launch a degree in Communications Studies in the UK. In 2006 it launched a weekly industry talk series called the Coventry Conversations whose long list of speakers includes Jeremy Paxman, Murray Walker, Donal Macintyre, Jeff Jarvis, Paul Abbott, Jeremy Vine, Baroness Valerie Amos and many more. Jon Snow, of Channel 4 News, is a visiting professor in the school. The school also has talk series in Open Media and Photography The school is underpinned by its "Open Media" approach to education in the fields of Media, Culture, Communication, Photography and the Visual Arts. This approach emerges from the issues, new working practices and substantial changes that have been brought about by development in digital culture and communications technologies over the past decade. As a result of this approach, it was the first practical media department in the UK to start broadcasting lectures to the iTunes U platform and onto the YouTube Edu platform in 2009 and has innovated in teaching learning through open technologies and pedagogies including the development of the world's first open iPhone application for a photography degree course as well as various other projects in Open Education in Photography and Creative Activism for which it has won international recognition. In terms of access to research - in July 2009 MC publicly established what was the 1st Green Open Access Mandate for a Humanities Department in the UK and only the 3rd for a Humanities Department in the World; it was also the UK's 24th Green Open Access Mandate This mandates faculty to make academic research output freely available online. The school is also home to the Coventry University East Asian Film Society and the CU Today Online Magazine
Open media
The school has a reputation for its distinct approach to learning called Open Media. Open Media is the term, which captures a series of interconnected principles that inform all the work of the school. In short Open Media & Communication means:
Open Media - positive and innovative engagements with new media technologies and new media and cultural forms and relationships, this is ‘open’ in the sense that it adopts a collaborative ethos and makes use of ‘freemium’ and ‘prosumption’ models of media and cultural practice;
Sustainable Professional Practice – building independent professional profiles through newly emerging media practices and relationships; engaging from the outset with new communities of scholarship and practice.
Engagement - the active participation of staff and students in live and transformative projects and with diverse communities of interest, be they professional, academic, cultural, or social. These activities open the university, by linking the delivery of content in traditional formats with projects that have a positive impact on the lives of those inside and outside its walls;
Globally Visible Media & Communication - using emerging media practices and networks to multiply and leverage the scope, scale and impact of our work. Engaging in work that is simultaneously local and global in scope and ensuring that this good work is accessible and visible at the same level
Open Pedagogies – teaching and learning which is collaborative, media-enabled and expanded – i.e. this approach begins by conceiving of the Department as our own community of learning, it makes use of innovative and collaborative learning styles, as well as the contributions of and dialogue with leading scholars and professionals across the globe, evaluates and uses libre material and crowd-sourced knowledge and encourages the strategic and reflective use of new technologies to develop extended communities of learning;
Academics
The School of Media and Performing Arts includes a number of academics working across a range of areas including Digital and Open Media, Global Media and Communications, Journalism Studies and Creative Media Practice. These include:
