Royal Holloway, University of London and UX Academy have recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding to explore a co-operative relationship together to develop User-Centred Design education.
The collaboration will aim to promote and enhance the delivery of User-Centred Design courses at Royal Holloway’s campus and at other locations. It will also provide a framework to explore joint workshops on User-Centred Design between UX Academy and Royal Holloway, with the possibility of future inclusion in an MSc in User-Centred Design or apprenticeships, and other activities such as seminars and conferences.
Royal Holloway originally worked with UX Academy in 2021, as part of the project "Interaction Design for the Masses", financed by a grant from the StoryFutures Academy’s Train the Trainer scheme. This teaching-led project brought together a cross-disciplinary team across the University to develop a course module called "User-Centred Design", presenting an interdisciplinary approach to prototyping and interaction design for immersive environments. The module is currently offered to students from Computer Science, Electronic Engineering, Media Arts and Psychology, and UX Academy has continued to play a part in its delivery over the past two years.
In 2022, Royal Holloway delivered a workshop at the Mobile UX London 2022 event to both students and industry practitioners, ranging from BT and Foundry to the Cabinet Office Government Digital Service, at UX Academy’s invitation as event sponsors.
Professor Carlos Matos, Head of the Department of Computer Science at Royal Holloway commented,
"At an initial stage we consulted with UX Academy to understand if the User-Centred Design module curriculum met industry expectations, and their ongoing participation in the delivery has been geared towards that goal. At Royal Holloway, we understand the value of bringing practitioners to the classroom to share experience and showcase tools that will benefit our students, develop their skills in these sought-after areas, and prepare them for future employment."
Founder of UX Academy, Naveed Ratansi commented,
"This collaboration builds on the industry-focused approach to learning we’ve successfully developed together for Royal Holloway’s students thus far. We look forward to extending our joint portfolio of education to reach out to a wider community, offering discounts for alumni CPD and career development opportunities for interdisciplinary audiences, to deliver meaningful user experience design training courses in London."
Royal Holloway and UX Academy are planning to offer two training opportunities to students from October 2023, covering UX Principles and User-Centred design. These are planned to take place in London as follows:
- 7 October / 14:00-17:30 / UX Principles
- 28 October / 14:00-17:30 / User-Centred Design
