School of Art + Design Adding Online Programs Beginning in Spring 2021

NJIT's School of Art and Design will begin offering graduate study starting next semester.

The school within Hillier College of Architecture and Design will offer four certificate programs starting in spring 2021 — Animation; Digital Arts; Game Design and Interactivity; and User Interface/User Experience (UI/UX) — and will also add Master of Science and Master of Fine Arts degrees in Digital Design, most likely beginning next fall, Hillier's academic leaders said.

"We are listening to those creative-class working adults who are motivated to enter new technologically-advanced digital design fields. These low-residency certificate and degree options provide flexible paths to acquire new knowledge and skills," explained John Cays, associate dean for academics. The college's current online instruction due to the coronavirus is serving as an unintentional beta test for graduate studies which were meant to be online, serving busy working adults, even before the pandemic happened, he said.

The school was established in 2008 to meet the demands of creative students interested in digital, interior and industrial/product design. "It's a big step for the School of Art and Design, and that should put it on equal footing with the School of Architecture," Dean Branko Kolarevic said. The new programs could help the school double in size from its current 200 students to 400 within a few years, as a key component of Hillier's wider goal of increasing the overall number of students from its current 671 to 900, he added.

Courses will be online with occasional on-campus events possible as campus COVID-19 protocols allow. Certificate credits can be stacked and applied to master's degrees. There will be a range of low residency options and part-time options for graduate students. Cays said course development is ongoing.

Architecture students will soon see changes to their academic studies, too. Undergraduate degree credit requirements are being reduced from 162 to 150, with graduate degrees reduced from 102 to 90. The goal was to make the programs leaner while maintaining academic rigor. Another reason was to make the degrees more competitive by reducing the workload per semester, Kolarevic said.

Despite these changes to the classic degree programs offered by Hillier College, some things never change. In game design, the field expanded greatly with the rise of mobile and multiplayer platforms, but many of the fundamentals remain the same as when digital gaming started in the 1970s.

Cays cited Galaga, Galaxian and Castle Wolfenstein as favorites from his youth. Kolarevic said his own preference was classic Space Invaders. He later became enamored of aircraft combat simulators.

Like classic architecture and other artistic genres, "Old games are still relevant today," Cays said. "The essential things that we found compelling then, we find compelling now."

Kolarevic said tracks such as game design and UI/UX tracks could share expertise and resources with other NJIT colleges, such as Ying Wu College of Computing and Martin Tuchman School of Management.