Cultural Management in the Digital Age

In association with its head office in Munich Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan Mumbai is initiating a two-year project (2020-21) on “Cultural Management in the Digital Age”. It will also include contributions from Goethe- Instituts Minsk and Shanghai.  

The project aims to build on existing work done by Goethe-Institut on trainings for cultural managers and develop cultural management expertise. It will involve setting up a curriculum for a summer school with focus on Cultural Management in the Digital Age. Based on the findings of the summer school, a relevant publication will be produced as part of a book sprint and made available as an Open Educational Resource (OER).  

The key objectives of this project are:  

  • Curriculum development and delivery of an international practice- oriented training programme 
  • The development of digital training materials and a final publication to be deployed as an open resource standard resource/ textbook (OER)  
  • Development of digital skills in cultural managers and providing them with relevant tools, resources and networking opportunities 
  • To make the subject more visible in the field of cultural management in general.  
  • The current need of the global cultural sector is to adapt to the digital universe, and engage in digital literacy practices. The summer school in 2021 will help establish a digital cultural management programme relevant to our times.  


The project is divided into three phases: 

Curriculum development 
The curriculum development will have core curriculum themes and subjects and relevant references, cases and reading material. But also the question: what comes after digitality? The formats will be developed and the materials compiled as a further step. The planned contents, references, etc. will be documented in a kind of module manual, thus writing down teaching and learning objectives and setting the concept as a kind of guideline. In the second year, the curriculum will be transferred to a summer school.  

Summer school 
The summer school is initially planned as a four-day classroom advanced training course. The developed subjects will be incorporated in the summer school as modules/blocks. The target group includes people with at least three years’ professional experience who are between 26 and 30 years old - digital natives who should have been working in roles aligned to using digital communication, products and services as part of their profile.  

Book sprint 
The results of the curriculum development and of the first summer school will be compiled – also in the second year – by holding a book sprint. This means that up to six experts will gather to draw up a collaborative publication of the subject matter, which will then be made available online as an Open Education Resource. The close cooperation between theory and practice would be reflected in the publication by including both theoretical and practical approaches to Cultural Management in the Digital Age. 

The first leg of this project will begin in July with a series of four internal and public workshops. 

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