In November 2024, employees at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (XJTLU) obtained a campus-wide e-mail from the Vice President for Academic Affairs. The message introduced that the School of Film and Television Arts and the School of Cultural Technology – each underneath the Academy of Film and Creative Technology (AFCT) – would merge and enter a proper restructuring section.
The reorganisation was led by Professor Qian Liu, Dean of AFCT, who had joined XJTLU lower than six months earlier. From the outset, University management had tasked him with main a significant transformation of the Academy.
Rebuilding an Academy
The plan went past merging faculties. Both the varsity layer and the normal division construction have been eliminated altogether. In their place, educational employees have been regrouped into three major topic teams: digital know-how, artistic content material technology, and entrepreneurship and business.
As Executive President Professor Youmin Xi explains: “AFCT’s restructuring responds both to the gap between its current stage of development and its strategic ambitions, and to structural challenges that emerged in its day-to-day operation.”
While the restructuring progressed in accordance to plan, Professor Liu spent appreciable time explaining its rationale throughout a number of inside boards, addressing issues and searching for consensus. The commonest query was easy: with out departments, how would teachers outline their skilled identification?
“One of the core goals of this restructuring,” Professor Liu explains, “is to align staff deployment directly with our educational objectives.”
Professor Qian Liu
The new construction replaces discipline- and job-specific models with topic teams, enabling educational employees to contribute, based mostly on their strengths, to educating and analysis throughout a number of programmes.
Industry stress and the query of expertise
The restructuring was formed by forces nicely past the University. In latest years, conventional filmmaking and TV manufacturing programmes have come underneath sustained stress from the diversification of the digital artistic industries.
Enrolment knowledge supplied a transparent sign: whereas the Digital Media Arts programme expanded from simply over a dozen college students per cohort to practically 100, conventional programmes reminiscent of Filmmaking and TV Production skilled regular contraction.This was not a easy case of shifting pupil preferences. “At its core, the change reflects a transformation in how content is produced and what kinds of talent the industry now demands,” Professor Liu notes.
Digital Media Arts gained momentum by emphasising interdisciplinary coaching, a number of talent units, and hands-on artistic observe. By distinction, conventional programmes with narrowly outlined boundaries struggled to hold tempo with speedy industrial change.
Against this backdrop, Professor Liu’s first transfer as Dean was not to revise curricula or introduce new applied sciences, however to redefine the Academy’s mission and imaginative and prescient. The intention was to realign AFCT with the evolving business and its expertise wants. This was not a response to a short-term development, however to a structural shift: the manufacturing of audiovisual content material itself was being remodeled, with range and innovation changing into defining options of the business.
“In the past, film and television education was organised around departments, with creative work and teaching largely separated, and training closely tied to specific media and job roles,” Professor Liu says. “That premise no longer holds.”
Today, movies, tv programmes, promoting, museum exhibitions and different varieties of media not sit inside mounted boundaries. They flow into as digital content material throughout screens, platforms, and contexts.
From job-based to capability-based schooling
In this atmosphere, conventional job-oriented schooling has revealed its limits. Roles evolve, disappear, and re-emerge quickly. At the identical time, digital applied sciences and synthetic intelligence have elevated effectivity, lowered prices, and shortened manufacturing cycles, rendering slender skill-based coaching – reminiscent of focusing solely on capturing or modifying – inadequate.
AFCT’s response was to redefine its academic purpose: to domesticate artistic expertise for audiovisual content material in digital codecs, moderately than specialists for movie or tv alone.
Fang Liu (third from left)
Accordingly, the Academy adopted a capability-based mannequin structured round three core dimensions: digital applied sciences and instruments; artistic content material technology; and understanding of business operations and entrepreneurship. The premise is straightforward: whereas content material varieties, platforms, and purposes range, audiovisual manufacturing constantly depends on digital instruments, platforms, and techniques.
This logic was embedded in AFCT’s organisational design. By changing departments with topic teams, the tutorial employees construction now instantly helps academic goals.
Breaking silos: designing for agility and transparency
Associate Dean Fang Liu, previously director of the Digital Media Arts programme, remembers the invisible boundaries of the previous construction. Students have been typically unable to take modules exterior their programme, and educational employees all in favour of cross-disciplinary educating confronted quite a few constraints. Even minor curriculum modifications may take a complete semester to coordinate.
The organisational construction had grow to be a set of silos, characterised by excessive communication prices and gradual decision-making. Curriculum reform was troublesome, and assets have been inefficiently allotted.
Only after the brand new construction was in place did significant curriculum reform start. Flattening the hierarchy and adopting a matrix-style organisation considerably shortened choice chains and improved operational effectivity.
“This structural change was the precondition for curriculum reform,” Fang Liu notes. “Once we agreed that all academic staff belong to one academy, rather than ‘your programme’ or ‘my programme’, collaboration became possible.”Under her management, AFCT broke down curricular boundaries throughout 4 undergraduate programmes, attaining over 60% shared core modules. Training now centres on capability-oriented, project-based studying, with the ultimate year devoted to personalised capstone tasks.
She likens the brand new curriculum to a pyramid: a shared basis of core capabilities; intermediate modules and tasks tailor-made to totally different pathways; and a peak of individualised, superior outcomes.
Staff administration additionally modified. Teaching assignments and efficiency analysis at the moment are coordinated by means of the three topic teams, utilizing clear knowledge on track masses and pupil numbers. Staff help a number of tasks moderately than a single programme, decreasing duplication and enhancing high quality.
A dome theatre and a strategic alternative
In December 2025, a dome theatre – uncommon in college settings – opened at XJTLU Entrepreneur College (Taicang). With an 18-metre diameter, 8K decision, and immersive encompass sound, it has grow to be one of the campus’s most hanging areas.
Yet the importance lies not within the specs, however in what it represents. Why place an rising, specialised immersive medium on the centre of AFCT’s growth?
For University management, appointing a brand new Dean and restructuring AFCT was an exploratory strategic transfer: how would possibly an academy function sustainably throughout two campuses and three schooling fashions?
Drawing on years of worldwide business expertise, Professor Liu selected the dome as a testing floor – an immersive medium that extends cinematic storytelling whereas providing irreplaceable public experiences. The dome anchors a broader imaginative and prescient: an built-in platform for creation, analysis and educating, and the launch of an International Immersive Media Creation Alliance.
This built-in design positions AFCT as a deliberate “first mover”. In Executive President Professor Xi’s pondering, it isn’t a template to be copied, however a pilot in observe: an early exploration of how XJTLU’s distinctive Academy mannequin can function, coordinate, and renew itself inside a posh configuration spanning two campuses, three schooling fashions, and shut hyperlinks to corporatised platforms and business companions.
The significance of this exploration lies exactly in its openness. The challenges confronting AFCT intently resemble these confronted by different Academies now present process restructuring. Its worth, subsequently, is just not to provide ready-made solutions, however to make clear, by means of observe, the working logic of a posh system, producing expertise that may inform future innovation.
By Bo Kou and Wenzhen Li
Edited by Patricia Pieterse