Bath Spa University and SWPS awarded Erasmus+ grant for ACCELERATE project

Posted on May 24, 2021

Bath Spa University has recently been awarded an Erasmus+ funded grant, which we had applied for in the final round of 2020 calls for which the UK was eligible. This ‘Strategic Partnership’ project starts in June 2021, runs for two years, and involves partners from the UK, Ireland, Poland and Ukraine. The project, ‘ACCELERATE: Accessible Immersive Learning for Art and Design’, has a simple but ambitious aim: to improve the teaching of art and design at higher education institutions in a post-pandemic Europe through the development of innovative methodologies, tools, platforms, and resources for accessible immersive learning. It is coordinated by Professor Ian Gadd, Head of Development for European Projects, who said: “ACCELERATE provides a fantastic and timely opportunity for art and design lecturers, educational researchers, and learning technologists from across Europe to reflect on the impact of COVID-19 on higher education teaching, 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.

A number of staff across BSU will be working on the project, led by Jenny Dunseath, Reader in Fine Art in Bath School of Art. For more information, please contact accelerate@bathspa.ac.uk.

 

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