Transcript of Cultural Heritage courses video

I think people always imagine that MSc teaching is someone standing up at the front of a classroom and telling you stuff and you scribbling away or typing away, and it's so not like that, it's very much engaged at all times depending on where you want to go, your personal trajectory through the course.

We currently have three MSc programmes that are also available as Postgraduate Diplomas and Postgraduate Certificates. The first one is in the Conservation and Management of Historic Buildings, it's those buildings that need extra care and extra understanding to make sure they're conserved for the future, but also have nice viable uses. We also run an MSc in Cultural Heritage Management, that's about the much broader sector, you look at things like museums how the whole planning system is set up, collections management, conservation deficit and funding, and where all those kinds of things come from. The third course we currently offer there is MSc Archaeology which is as it sounds, you'll learn the practical training that goes with archaeology as well as the theoretical side that backs things up and helps us to interpret the past.

One of our USPs I think is the real flexibility because so many of our students are either working or mid-career professionals who want to, you know, take that next step, so we always teach just on two days a week for full-time students and one for part-time students. All our classroom teaching is delivered online and in person simultaneously so you can either join in the room or you can join from home on your computer.

Within five minutes walk of our building in Swindon we've got National Trust, we've got English Heritage, we've got historic England, we've got the National Archives, we're in the middle of this heritage action zone which means there's loads of projects going on all around us.  So for example last week all the students went  with me to the Health Hydro Project which is a wonderful space built for the workers at the GWR and we were able to go in and walk around and be shown that development in action, and then on the  same day you can jump on a bus and go to Lechlade and go around William Morris' house and have this wonderful sort of arts and crafts experience and see, you know, totally the other end. We will, you know, go around the lovely historic house and then we'll take ourselves through the tea shop, put a load of benches together in the garden and we will just sit down and we will debate what we saw and we will throw questions at each other and we will really pick these places apart.

We have some really nice outcomes for our graduate students, so out of last year's crop we've got a guy who's gone to work at conservation architects, we have someone who's gone to work as a buildings pathologist, so that's sort of working out what's wrong with historic ones and fixing it, and we've got one really good  graduate who's gone out as a regional manager role for the churches preservation trust, so there are  some really nice outcomes for our students.