How the Mandalorian Effect & AI Lean changes higher education

8 min readMar 1, 2024

Wet, cold and shivering in Southern Wales, and yet there was rarely a better way to study the terrain and toxicity in the river.

In Norway, NATO is running War Games with real combatants and special forces using laser-pointed sighting. Nato has dropped twenty Masters students and I into the middle of this war, so military brass can learn about themselves and the media.

Meanwhile, our MAs consider whether a life as a conflict or international correspondent is for them. It framed the early part of my career in the 1990s as a foreign correspondent. Could this be simulated in a lecture?

Author and Editor in Chief Dr David Dunkley Gyimah with Sheryl

Then only last week a group of Masters students looking to reform Britain’s ailing hospital waiting list system suggest solutions. The best bet scenario is to collect data (difficult as that may be) within hospitals, administrators and Trusts — a complex problem. All require creativity, critical skills and collaboration.

How could these be undertaken in higher learning to be more effective? What if the issue could be brought to them, using also AI to model data? The answer lies in a Movie Image technology used to innovate series like The Mandalorian, coupled with a real-life systems thinking approach to problem-solving, A.I. and cine-story telling.

AI Shifts the Dial

Hitherto still effective, though increasingly restrictive, fixed seated lectures or seminars have served their purpose for many years. They are a carry over from an industrialised analogue period, in cases updated to respond to modern demands, reads The Idea of the Digital University (2012), adding:

In the renaissance much of the scientific advances did not take place in the universities, but outside them, often to the scorn of the universities and their faculty. Galileo, Leonardo, da Vinci, Machiavelli, Descartes, Leibniz, Bacon, Locke Hume and Kepler were not part of the University culture but thrived outside of it.

Lecture-based modular delivery and assessment answers defined goals, and the lens by which students are made to see events framed around a model; hegemonic and more often than not Global North-West centred.

Climate change, Jan Wilkens and Alvine R.C. Datchouha-Tirvaudey’s research tells us we ignore intersectional global south policies at our peril, a new banking system for South African township folk embraces policies alien in the North, and The Lean Approach so favoured by many start-ups was lifted from Japan’s Toyoda process — shame they didn’t go the whole hog.

Today, digital and the social media age have exposed diverse thinking between kinds, West and East, Global North and South and brought new pressures on once unchallenged answers, putting pressure on student knowledge and attention.

Yet, the onset of Gen AI, and LED-Volume facilities offer a game-changer to higher learning. Mandalorian fans have revelled in this, marking the series’ innovative productions which creatively brings new worlds and environments into a studio via projected screens, controlled by data inputs.

Virtual Production

So imagine climatologists, journalism, or interdisciplinary teams who look like they’re on location but are actually in a virtual production studio.

That’s right, the image above is a holo deck. Turn on the screens and you get this. Students actually sitting hundreds of miles away in a studio with digital projections recreating the environment.

The versatility of virtual production means the setting can be changed to suit the programme being delivered. Hence, our MA students seated in a Virtual Production Studio could be placed within a hospital environment to help solve waiting list problem.

The benefits are unimaginable, but the costs at the moment seem prohibitive. It’ll require capital input and a rearchitecting of higher learning leading to a complete overhaul of education and the student experience. Whoever gets their first will dominate the future. But the concept is not a question of if, but when?

Last Wednesday on a Teams call from the University of Surrey with senior academics I learned about their new resource putting AI at the centre of new PhD programmes and media comms. Scores of PhD students are set to benefit.

Yet, what also caught my interest was Surrey’s relationship with Royal Holloway University which is the lead UK University creating Convergent Screen Technologies and performance in Realtime (coSTAR). This envelops virtual productions, AR and VR knitting together computing, drama and Arts programmes.

The initiative is part of the UK government’s £75.6million fund to construct a world leading virtual production research centre and largest development network in Europe. Royal Holloway’s key industry partners include Pinewood Studios,BT, Surrey , University of Surrey, and National Film and Television School (NFTS) to name a few.

CoSTAR signals virtual lectures are within reach. Then there are other proprietary softwares like Cuebric that produce Generative AI immersive backgrounds

The Virtual-Real World

To have virtual worlds in academia yields a secondary impact; the inevitable delivery of interdisciplinary learning combined with gaming.

In 2017 the Times Higher Education ran this headline:

Universities need to create new models of learning and adopt tech hubs fusing different subjects.

The rationale then was how new cohorts could address the complexities of a digital, socially-dynamic world in which employers were calling for creativity and critical thinking.

Modular subject learning, as old as the hills, was popularised in the 20th century by the Open University answering the need for flexible and increasingly diverse student body.

Yet, digital and current complexities of social issues and their intersectionality (take climate crisis and race), coupled with employers’ demand for creative and critical thinking new recruits has put pressure on modular studies.

Today, AI risks a total upend of economies with a pending dramatic shift in jobs on the horizon. Social and tech innovation is something that has pre-occupied my work for decades. But even without AI just yet as I discovered at Scrivener, the UK’s leading Military training bass, a $40 game playing space combat is interdisciplinary enough to disrupt modular learning.

Creativity and Lean Productions

Artificial Intelligence and Lean are both predicated on the ability for users to be creative, something I teach and have had the pleasure of being an Artist in Residence at the Southbank Centre. Anyone can be taught to a creative warrior.

As an academic, creative journalist and technologist, leading KTPs (knowledge Transfer Partnerships) I’ve been studying transformative technologies since working in dotcoms (circa 1989).

Apple captured this almost twenty years ago before social media had taken off. This from leading journalism site journalism.co.uk in 2006 where I speak about the burgeoning Outernet and my latest work on AI-non-fiction documentaries focuses on diversity to retell hidden stories.

The Real World

Presently, in our LAB, we’ve collapsed creative storytelling, App prototype and platform development through systems, design and diversity thinking, with creative output with AI.

Our Masters students learn agile digital productions supported by an array of incredible mentors we’ve approached from industry.

This image in 2017 captures leading Business group the Company of Entrepreneurs and figures like Simon Fordham, Nicola Manning Rachel Wang, Lee Robertson Chartered FCSI FRSA, Judy Hadden Stephen Wheatley and Tony Harrison, prepping to question students.

As we head deeper into an AI-driven world, we’re keen to work with the next generation of creatives, particularly from diverse backgrounds, and also to collaborate with academic institutions, funding bodies e.g. @UKRI, sponsors, and private institutions to create a unique pathway for creative enterprise and storytelling entrepreneurs.

UK Research Innovation’s (UKRI) accelerator fund helped us to launch an adjacent program. This year we launched our international publication Media Hyphenates (MH) that captures the mood of unfolding AI developments, Podcasting, and App building to name a few wrapped in social stories. design, systems and diversity thinking.

Students and mentors capture their social-tech stories cinematically from the prototypes they’ve produced. The reception has been very encouraging. And we’re working with amazing new set of mentors.

Here’s what students have said over the years, ending with Shaimaa Khalil now the BBC’s Japan Correspondent back in 2006 when I was sharing how to write for the web.

Our lead feature in Media Hyphenayes is an exclusive insight into a new global platform UnPress merging new storytelling and AI. Students peer into the future circa 2040 (using systems thinking) to explain the world, and I write about how AI documentary making will benefit diverse communities and people of colour.