Reimagining Creative Education in the Age of AI | Chris Mitchell, Royal College of Art

A few years ago, Dr. Chris Mitchell did something unsettling in his classroom at the Royal College of Art.

He fed the same assessment brief his students were working on into a generative AI tool and then asked the students to evaluate the output. Almost all of them said it was a pass. He looked at it again on the train home, and thought: yeah, I think so too.

His first reaction was terror. His second was more useful.

“It was a reflection of my bad assessment design.”

If an AI could pass it, he realised, then the assessment was never really measuring the things that mattered — curiosity, imagination, personal investment in the work. It was measuring the ability to compare and summarise information. Generative AI is very good at that. But that is not what creative education is actually for.

So he redesigned it. Instead of comparing X and Y, he asked students to take a teaching session that had meant something to them — personally, formatively — and redesign it, explaining why. The results were completely different. Impossible to fake. “We had examples of people drawing on learning in a choir, or a workshop around ocarina making,” he told me. “It’s just so much fun to mark.”

That moment captures something important about where we are with AI and education right now — and it’s just one thread in a really rich conversation.

Chris is Head of Academic Strategy Development at the RCA and the creator of the MA in Creative Education. We talked for over an hour about what formal education is genuinely for, why the RCA builds everything around making and reflection, how hybrid learning can be done well (and what goes wrong when it isn’t), and why creativity is something every person can access — not a trait some people have and others don’t.

We also got into the RCA’s long-standing pass/fail grading system — no marks, just detailed written feedback — and what it demands from both tutors and students.

👉 Watch the full conversation on YouTubehttps://youtu.be/BIrrwVRFUzc

👉 Read the blog posthttps://bloomerangas.com/blog/reimagining-creative-education-in-the-age-of-ai-insights-from-royal-college-of-art/

I hope it sparks something for you — whether you work in education, whether you’re a creative practitioner thinking about AI, or whether you’re just curious about what it looks like to build an institution around the act of making things.