On 16 March, a panel of five professionals conducted an on-site accreditation of the Media Arts and Design Programme (MAD) that is aiming to be offered next academic year.
Their two-and-a-half-day schedule was intense, featuring tours of facilities, as well as meetings with the MAD Programme Planning Team, Advisory Committee members, potential employers and students. The informative visit convinced them that this new programme under the new Division of Culture and Creativity (DCC) is well-organised and relevant to the educational needs and development of UIC and its students.
“We would like to say we strongly support your programme,” concluded panel chair Prof Eleanor Gates-Stuart from the University of Canberra at the verbal report session, who was also a visiting professor of Taiwan’s Cheng Kung University.
Led by the Programme Planning Team, the panel members visit the 3D Innovation and Development Lab
“This on-site accreditation is very important and helpful to us,” said Prof Chih-Yung Aaron Chiu, Interim Dean of DCC. “Previously, postal accreditation was arranged for new UIC programmes which have counterparts at HKBU, but the MAD is a brand-new programme and hasn’t been offered in HKBU so they wanted to come to see how we are going to do it.”
Prof Chiu continued: “As requested by HKBU, we recommended a name list of experts to form a panel to accredit our programme. The Chairman of HKBU Quality Assurance Committee approved the final list with professional rigour after good flows of communication.
“In the beginning, they suggested only four panel members as this was conventional. However, MAD is an interdisciplinary programme which extends across two Professional Faculties of HKBU: the School of Communication and the Academy of Visual Arts. I believed a fifth member would be of great help to us since all of them were from multiple professional backgrounds. These members could provide constructive and useful advice which might help us learn more about our work from different angles. Understanding this reasonable explanation, HKBU accepted and endorsed our idea.”
On the final list of on-site panel members, in addition to the Chair who was from Australia, the rest were from the Communication University of China, Taiwan University of Arts and HKBU.
The successful on-site accreditation is not the end. The Programme Planning Team still has a lot to do, following a set of standards that have been instructed by the Academic and Administrative Quality Assurance Office.
“An official written document of the accreditation is expected to be sent to us at the end of April. We will then respond, get it through the review from our college’s Quality Assurance Committee as well as the Senate, and wait for the ultimate approval from the HKBU Senate in June,” Prof Chiu added.
Prof Chiu thanked the unstinting support from President Ng Ching-Fai, who is the mastermind of the MAD Programme. The interdisciplinary Programme Planning Team has been putting in hard work and effort. Contributions were made by Craig Voligny (Assistant Professor of MAD), Prof Evelyn Mai (Associate Dean of DHSS, Director of CTV), Dr Barend Venter (Associate Prof of PRA), Dr Amy Zhang (Associate Prof of CST), Dr Purrie Ng (Director of CCM), Jamie Dong (Coordinator of ACDC), and Prof Yu-Chuan Tseng (Adjunct Prof of MAD).
This article is republished from MPRO's UIC Beacon Issue XIX. To view an online version of the full newsletter, please click here (Wi-Fi network recommended); to download the original PDF file, please click here.
