Course overview
5 reasons to partner with Teesside University:
- Industry expertise: the School of Arts & Creative Industries is a hotbed of industry expertise, offering a hands-on, industry-engaged learning experience with a global network. Through our Launchpad partnership, we connect students and businesses for mutual growth.
- Future-proofing skills:ensure your employees learn how AI, VR, AR, urban graphics, motion graphics, and digital storytelling will be valuable to your organisation – all of which is covered in our course.
- Adobe Creative Campus: we are an Adobe Creative Campus. Our collaborations with Adobe and other industry titans in the UK and globally ensure our curriculum remains cutting-edge.
- Relevant projects: the nature of the programme and delivery ensures that your apprentice is working on projects relevant to your organisation, adding bottom-line value and continuously developing your creative design repertoire.
- Expert educators: our staff, drawn from diverse digital design backgrounds across various professional sectors, are experienced educators eager to impart their wisdom to your team.
Our Creative Digital Design Professional Degree Apprenticeship is a cost-effective route to equipping your team with the skills to stay competitive in a fast-moving digital business environment.
Businesses in any sector will benefit significantly from this apprenticeship. Whatever products and services you offer, it is crucial that you reach your audiences through a variety of digital channels with impactful and eye-catching creative digital designs.
Working closely with a wide range of businesses, in a variety of sectors, this programme has been developed to ensure your apprentice builds the skills needed both now and, in the future, to stay ahead of the game. The nature of the programme and delivery ensures that your apprentice is working on a project relevant to your organisation and your creative design needs throughout.
Please note, we can only respond to enquiries from employers, or individuals with agreement from their employer to undertake an apprenticeship.
Course details
Course structure
Year 1 core modules
Apply your creative and analytical skills to a wide variety of business and social contexts. Gain insights into the value of creativity and design and how this can best be managed or used as a strategic tool in creative sectors. Explore these strategies' practical application and impact to inform your design work and development.
Study the principles, methodologies, and tools of usercentric experience including user experience (UX), formalisation of UX, user scenarios, prototyping, and user testing and evaluation.
You become familiar with the concepts of UX design for different platforms and explore prototyping tools to develop solutions to different user needs and expectations.
Fundamentals of Digital Imagery
Explore the principles, methodologies, and tools of digital 2D and 3D image creation. You focus on principles of digital imagery and undertake practical sessions on applications of and industry standard tools for digital 2D and 3D images.
Introduction to Design and Creative Thinking
Familiarise yourself with design as a creative methodology of problem-solving and its basic vocabulary. Enjoy an introduction to design processes whilst you explore the user's role in design, users' needs, how to use those needs toward creative design, and the development of multiple solution ideas for solving a problem.
Practically explore creative design through exercises such as key techniques for evaluating creative design concepts, generating ideas, developing prototypes, and receiving peer feedback. You investigate digital artefacts, focusing on their visual and procedural design features and discuss how digital design is shaped by technology.
Year 2 core modules
Gain skills in design research, participatory design, intersectional approaches, social entrepreneurship, and critical analysis to become responsible creative practitioners. Develop sustainable, inclusive design practices for diverse target groups to address the complexity of the problems individuals and societies are facing nowadays.
You are introduced to augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) technologies and to guid in designing and developing human-centred immersive experiences. You explore smart environments, immersion and presence, AR and VR technologies, fidelity and validity of simulators, space perception, multi-modal VR and VR sickness.
You focus on the principles of augmented and virtual reality environments and provide practical sessions on different tools, areas, and applications of augmented and virtual reality applications.
Develop the processes and techniques involved in creating motion graphics sequences including producing 2D and 3D animations for the internet. Expand your knowledge and evaluation of historical, contemporary and future practice in this field, and applyi digital production skills and methods to create a range of motion graphic assets.
Dive into the principles, methodologies, and tools of visual communication design for urban environments including mapping, augmented reality, signage systems, location-based applications, and smart screens for urban settings.
You focus on the affordances of urban environments in terms of communication design and principles of urban graphic design for traditional and digital outdoor platforms and provide practical sessions on different tools, areas, and applications of urban graphics design.
Final-year core modules
Consolidation for Creative Digital Design – End Point Assessment
Your final module consists of two elements:
1. A work-based project (set by your employer) with presentation and questioning
2. Consolidated portfolio presentation and professional discussion
Demonstrate your synthesis of on-programme modules, collaboration with the workplace and Teesside University.
The consolidated portfolio, created during the Creative Digital Design Final Portfolio module, is formally presented to the assessor where you are asked a series of questions, to help explain your learning journey.
Creative Digital Design Final Portfolio
Create a professional portfolio that articulates the relationship between you, the University and your workplace in a collaborative process of knowledge generation and use.
Your portfolio synthesises the key elements of the course to demonstrate knowledge and understanding of creative digital design including work from previous modules. You also produce a written accompaniment of your learning journey (created in Smart Assessor), underpinning the projects included.
Learn how to make thoughtful design choices in data visualisation and gain skills in crafting compelling, impactful factual narratives with data as you use, interpret and organise data to communicate effectively. Prepare to speak the language of data, build coherent data stories and create rich, informative data visualisations. Develop techniques that help integrate data visualisation into narrative factual stories and use tools and frameworks provided in the module to build data visualisations that effectively communicate insights about data in multiple formats and interactive visualisations.
Project Management in Creative Industries
Develop an advanced understanding of a variety of project management tools that are applied across the creative sector including collaborative and financial. You synthesise client-ready skills around planning, market research, pitching and how to successfully evaluate your projects.
Modules offered may vary.
How you learn
The apprenticeship is designed to encourage the development of a range of skills in design, prototyping, digital skills and developing professional practice as a creative practitioner through understanding developments and approaches to industry. Apprentices develop technical, conceptual, critical, socially, and ethically aware future-focused skills throughout their learning journey.
Learning follows a project-based approach which includes a research phase, ideation through to realisation.
During the iteration stages of artefact development apprentices progress their work through a series of peer and tutor feedback sessions developing their skills and competencies as they progress through the levels for study.
All modules encourage and guide learners to create a written journal of work produced acknowledging how each module maps to the knowledge, skills and behaviours for the course. This journal is submitted as part of a portfolio (and will exclude any critical reflections produced within the modules).
How you are assessed
All modules have one single component of summative assessment to prevent overburden. The variety of assessment tasks include:
- creative pitch
- design assets
- prototypes
- professional portfolios
- design projects
- live/Industry briefs.
Our Disability Services team provide an inclusive and empowering learning environment and have specialist staff to support disabled students access any additional tailored resources needed. If you have a specific learning difficulty, mental health condition, autism, sensory impairment, chronic health condition or any other disability please contact a Disability Services as early as possible.
Find out more about our disability services
Entry requirements
Entry requirements
To be accepted on to a degree apprenticeship course you must have support from your employer and meet the course entry requirements.
Applicants must have support from their employer and meet the course entry requirements.
The apprentice must be employed in a relevant job role to undertake this apprenticeship and agreement from you as the employer, including the commitment to a minimum of 6 hours per week off-the-job training.
You, as the employer, set the general internal selection criteria but the apprentice is also required to meet the entry requirements specified by the University. A typical learner would have 96 tariff points from at least two A levels (or equivalent).
You can gain considerable knowledge from work, volunteering and life. Under recognition of prior learning (RPL) you may be awarded credit for this which can be credited towards the course you want to study.
Find out more about RPL
Employability
Career opportunities
The Creative Digital Design Professional Apprenticeship is for individuals from a range of sectors who want to develop their careers.
