The rapid development of digital-age learning invites campuses to rethink the ways in which they offer online instruction. UC Santa Cruz will provide a ”first of its kind” Bachelor of Arts in Creative Technologies beginning in fall 2024. 

UC Santa Cruz music professor Ben Leeds Carson has been exploring the intersections of art, technology, and equitable education since 1999 and is now directing the UC System’s first online degree.

“We want to partner with students and build a broad-based arts education,” Carson said. “[Digital] environments are really exciting spaces for imagination and the pursuit of justice, higher knowledge, stronger community, and democracy.” 

The creative technologies major will be offered online and allows students flexibility in where and how they pursue their degree. Students will still be required to take two units per quarter for three quarters to achieve the UC System’s residency requirement. 

With respect to the degree’s commitment to accessibility, Carson says the obligation to be in residence for creative technologies majors will be much less than other students.

“We have a lot of work to do at UC to become a truly public institution,” Carson said. “Creative technologies faculty are trying to make a program that steps further in the direction that helps the problem of inaccessible and privatized education.”

In recent years, online education has increased as a viable and accessible way to obtain a degree. The tuition for creative technologies will be the same as any other major. However, faculty are looking to lower cost of living expenses through a primarily online major and provide open access materials for its students for a more affordable option.

Michael Tassio, the Assistant Vice Provost of Educational Innovation at UCSC was involved in the development process of creative technologies alongside arts faculty for the last five years. 

He emphasizes the importance of online education as a tool to serve marginalized groups such as young parents, people with disabilities, and low-income individuals. Tassio says that the creative technologies major is exciting for “stopouts,” or students who have been unable to complete degrees due to life circumstances.

“Developing an online degree program that would provide degree completion is something that I’m highly interested in,” Tassio said. “[It] can create opportunities that provide new pathways for students to really rise up from difficult situations that they’ve had in their past and gain social mobility through education.”

The curriculum for creative technologies plans to bring about an arts education which emphasizes justice by exploring the decolonization of media, hidden histories, and continued resistance to oppression. Inaugural faculty will shape courses that challenge students to think about the integration of diversity, justice, and equity into developing technologies such as coding and generative artificial intelligence. 

“Resistance to authoritarian rule or resistance to neoliberalism has not occurred without collaboration across a wide variety of media and a wide variety of creative work,” Carson said. “We see artists as being fundamental and essential to the pursuit of that kind of justice.”

The principal faculty for the creative technologies major currently consists of art and design: games and playable media (AGPM) professors Kristen Gillette and A.M. Darke, with hopes to recruit more faculty from other departments.                                                                                          

Professor Gillette says incorporating synchronous elements, open discussion, and collaborative projects will help foster a sense of community among creative technologies students.

“I’m hoping folks make connections between where they are and bring that to the classroom,” Gillette said. “I want to make that feeling extended to folks who are attending all over California or even farther.”

Professor Ben Leeds Carson also spoke on the importance of creative thinking across all fields; especially in an age in which conventional careers are transforming because of machine intelligence and other rapidly developing technologies. 

“I hope students at UC Santa Cruz across all divisions will become more curious about arts and media,” Carson said. “I hope they recognize that cultivating their creative selves is one of the most important things that students can do to strengthen their role in society.”

This article was published as part of a backlog of content from December 2023.