Master's (MASc)

A master’s built to navigate the complexities of the future. Not the past.

Overview

The world of work doesn’t respect subject boundaries. So why should your education?

Today’s professionals need to be hybrid. And they need to have range. The modern workplace requires you to engage with complexity, navigate the dynamics of human behaviour, and make sense of a data-rich world. This demands quantitative and qualitative skills, be they statistical, computational, communicative, or visual.

You also need to be comfortable with unfamiliar and complex challenges. The explosion of data, the rapid advancement of technology, the drive for a more equal society, and the necessity of a more sustainable future; these phenomena will increasingly shape our work environments.

The LIS master’s will equip you with the hybrid skills, connected knowledge and interdisciplinary (ID) mindset you need to futureproof your career.

Watch the video to find out more

The programme

Core components

Learn how to work across a range of domains and graduate from the MASc with a toolkit of analytical skills that employers need.

Hybrid skills

At the centre of the MASc is a set of hybrid skills. These have been chosen specifically for their applicability to your future career.

The workplace today is inherently interdisciplinary and data-rich. At its root are three deep systems: language, statistics, and visual media. Analytical skills in these vital areas are typically taught in isolation.

The LIS master’s takes a different approach. Having established foundational capablities in each domain, you will learn how to combine these skills, enabling you to engage with complex real-world questions and arrive at informed conclusions.

Developing your own interdisciplinary skillset will allow you to work confidently with data of any type. Your ability to work at speed and scale will be supported further by instruction in a coding language like Python or R.

ID lenses

Combining hybrid skills with interdisciplinary (ID) lenses will give you the intellectual tools to gain traction on some of the biggest issues we face.

The MASc equips you with two ID lenses, each built on robust conceptual knowledge:

Complexity, as it relates to systems, networks and forecasting; drawing on mathematics, philosophy and the natural sciences
Culture, in terms of human behaviour and organisation; drawing on the social and behavioural sciences

These lenses will give you tools and perspectives that you can bring to bear on a wide variety of complex challenges. To ensure they are maximally transferable, learning will be applied to three contemporary problem areas: health, inequality, and artificial intelligence.

Capstone

The capstone is an invitation to integrate and apply the knowledge and skills you’ve learned on the master’s to an area of particular interest to you. This project demands creativity, autonomy, and originality.

Under the supervision of an LIS Faculty member and enriched through engagements with external professionals, you will explore a problem that is of professional, social, or academic importance.

The outcome should be an intellectually rigorous product that is of genuine value. This should become a key part of your professional portfolio; that will help guide and support you in the next steps of your career.

The MASc

Module content

The programme is comprised of seven modules. Two are conceptually oriented (ID lenses); four are primarily skills-based (hybrid skills); and the final module will be your capstone project. The course content listed below is indicative, subject to approval, and may change ahead of the master's commencing in 2022.

Engaging Complexity and Mapping Systems

The most pressing social and organisational challenges that we face are complex in nature. It involves multiple interacting systems that evolve in unpredictable ways. This module will introduce you to complexity theory and its application to dynamic systems. Drawing on perspectives from across the natural sciences, you will learn how self-regulating systems maintain their integrity (or fail to) in the face of externally mediated shocks, whether these shocks occur on long or short timescales. This will provide you with the tools to think about change at a fundamental level and equip you to influence complex systems in the future.

Culture and Collective Intelligence

This module is about the cultural and social technologies that human beings use to coordinate themselves as groups. If we are successful as a species it’s because we coordinate individual intentions into collective actions using tools like religion, companies, sports teams, sub-cultures, and a host of other social forms.

Learning how human beings leverage social and cultural structures to bring about collective intelligence can give us deep insights into how effective organisations are built and improved.

Cracking the Code

This module will teach you to programme. If you are a novice coder, the language you learn will be Python; if you can code in Python already, you will learn another language of your choosing. Instruction will be delivered through a third-party provider, supported by peer and faculty mentoring.

The Right Word

The ability to successfully communicate with meaning and impact has become essential for organisational life. This module will draw on disciplines grounded on the basis of language; linguistics, philosophy, psychology of language, and literary studies. This will arm you with skills that are central to the creation and interpretation of language. You will also learn about language from numerical and visual perspectives, with reference to the interplay between language and visualisation and how language structure shapes our thinking about statistics.

Everything Counts

This module will teach you methods of numerical estimation and data analysis. The principal numerical literacies that will be taught will be statistical in nature. This will focus on descriptive and inferential statistics from Bayesian and frequentist perspectives. This will give you tools that can be applied across multiple forms of quantitative data. You will also learn about numerical methods from linguistic and visual perspectives, with specific reference to how complex quantitative systems can be visualised and communicated.

Re: Form

In an image-saturated world, visual literacy has become a core competence. This module addresses visual media through disciplines that have image as their primary subject matter; art theory, videography, photography, visual anthropology, and art history. This module will equip you with the ability to produce and interpret images. Furthermore, image data will be explored from statistical and linguistic perspectives so that the digital image becomes accessible as a target of both quantitative and interpretive analysis.

Capstone Project

This is an individual project that allows you to engage with a problem of your choice under the close supervision of a faculty member. This may be a self-contained project that ends on completion of the programme, or it may be a way in which you identify a professional project that you can engage with across your career.

Beyond academics

Unlock your career

Interconnectedness is a key feature of the programme; at the curriculum level, you will explore the creative combination of knowledge and skills across different domains. But our commitment to connectivity goes beyond academics. LIS is deeply integrated with the world of work

During your time at LIS, you will have multiple opportunities to engage with a diversity of organisations from across the LIS Network. These engagements may include:

Enrichment of the academic curriculum by employer organisations
Insights into the contemporary challenges faced by these organisations
Employer contributions to our extra-curricular programme focused on developing your professional skills
Invitations to LIS events including workshops, hackathons and panel discussions

We believe strongly in the power of the cohort. The master’s learning journey will be collaborative and supportive. But the outcome will ultimately be personal. The MASc will supercharge your intellectual development and prepare you for your chosen path.

Meet the team

Faculty

A group of world-class academics, entrepreneurs, and educationalists have come together to form the teaching team at LIS. You can view the team here >>

At the helm of the master’s learning experience is Dr James Carney who, alongside the members of the LIS faculty, boasts collective expertise across a wide variety of disciplines.

Dr James Carney

James has worked in various academic positions across the UK and Ireland. James’ interests centre on finding empirically robust patterns in social and cultural data and extracting actionable insights from quantitative data. Whilst a Wellcome Trust Fellow at Brunel University London, James used methods from machine learning and experimental psychology to establish the therapeutic impact of fiction on anxiety and depression.

James is also a founding director of Texture AI, an intelligence company that uses deep learning and linguistics to evaluate commercially significant data sources.

Studying on the master's

How you'll learn

Your learning and development will extend beyond the constraints of a traditional lecture theatre or classroom; teaching on the master’s is based on the latest science of learning.

We believe your learning experience should reflect how we think and work in the modern world. So we deliver a high-touch experience that uses the latest digital technology. This means that contact time will be discursive and interactive so that you can get maximum value from both your peers and the LIS teaching team.

Learning will take place through a number of different formats:

Plenaries
Seminars
Group coaching
One-to-one tutorials
Access to dedicated multi-media resources

Who's the MASc for?

The cohort will come from a range of academic and professional backgrounds. What they will have in common is a recognition that the working world is changing – this requires an interdisciplinary toolkit that can be applied to the diversity of complex professional challenges that are shaping our future.

The MASc is intellectually stimulating and academically rigorous but the learning experience and outcomes will ultimately be practical.

Individuals on the MASc want to:

Upgrade their analytical skills (quant. and qual.)
Develop transferable ID tools
Identify and pursue future career options
Enhance their professional network
Satisfy their intellectually curiosity

Find out more

Key Information

Admissions

Admissions will open in January 2022. Applications will be considered on a rolling basis (i.e. as they are received) so submit early to avoid missing the close date.

Fees

Home students: £15,000 (this fee applies to UK students, as well as EU students holding settled and pre-settled status under the European settlement scheme)
International students: £25,000

You can find out more about our course fees, financing options, and support available through getting in touch with masters@lis.ac.uk.

Please note, in future years, fees for continuing students may be subject to an inflationary increase.

Regulation

LIS has been granted degree-awarding powers for its undergraduate programme by the higher education regulator in England, the Office for Students (OfS). These powers need to be extended in order for us to award a master’s degree. We have started this regulatory journey and will keep you updated as we move through this process.

International students

An international student is someone who does not have “settled” status in the UK and would need to apply for a visa to study in the UK.

We have a sponsorship license which means we are able to welcome international students. Please get in touch if you have questions about your status in the UK or your application as an international student.

English language

The LIS master’s is taught in English. To derive full benefit from and succeed in passing, you must be able to understand and express yourself in English (reading and listening, speaking and writing). If you’ve been taught and assessed in English or have been working in the English language for the past two years or longer, you do not need to provide an English language qualification.

If, however, you have not been in education where classes, coursework, and assessments were conducted in English for the past two years or longer, or if you have not been working in the English language for the past two years or longer, you will be asked to specify any English language qualifications that you hold. We will also ask that you email a copy of your qualification transcript to admissions@lis.ac.uk

All English language qualifications must be no more than two years old to be valid.

Interested?

Register your interest to be the first to know when applications go live for the master’s programmes along with important developments and updates.

Contact us

Get in touch

If you have any questions about the master's please feel free to get in touch with the LIS team.

Telephone enquiries

0203 409 1912

Email enquiries

masters@lis.ac.uk

Master's (MASc)

Overview

The world of work doesn’t respect subject boundaries. So why should your education?

The programme