The Gift of Learning : Storytelling and Digital Media Courses

With it being that time of year where many people are purchasing gifts, I’ve been pondering spending and what is important to me. It had me thinking of that old proverb …

Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.

Photographer: Cristian Palmer — Photographed by Cristian Palmer, care of Unsplash.

There is no greater gift than learning a skill that helps you to pursue your passions. This is the reason why teaching is an important part of our work, that our team values.

The Importance of Teaching to Our Team

When I started speaking in 2008 about bridging the worlds of media, interactive and cross-platform storytelling, and digital media, it occurred to me that while inspiring people through my talks was great and all, to truly help people to take action, they needed a course giving them guidance and support while they build and craft their storyworlds.

Interactive Storytelling — Erica Hargreave and Caitlin Burns on a Panel on Convergent Storytelling.
Photographer: Liz Kearsley

A year later, after pitching the local post secondary schools, my first post-secondary school courses launched at BCIT and Capilano University. Since then my team and I have also built courses and workshops and taught community, undergraduate and graduate courses at Ryerson University, Humber College, and NVIT. In addition, we’ve helped build new programs and revise old programs. It has both been an honour to teach and share with others, and fulfills a passion of ours. We love teaching.

Creating Our Course Online

In 2011, after speaking in Egypt, we recognized that to truly make a difference to people that could most benefit from our courses, we needed them to be available online.

Erica Hargreave speaking on ‘Real Time’ Storytelling at the UNWTO Conference on Working with Media in Challenging Times in Marsa Alam, Egypt.

Thanks to BCIT and our colleague Kevin Ribble, they were by 2013. This has also allowed Lori Yearwood to help build and teach those courses with me.

2020 Courses at BCIT

I am happy to share that as we move into 2020, we now have 2 online post-secondary credited courses and 2 intensive community courses offered through BCIT’s Broadcast Media and Communications Part Time Studies. All of our courses are project based, in which our students come out of them having built or built upon projects of their own that they are crafting for their future endeavours.

For those of you who are looking to give yourself and someone in your life the gift of learning this year, these are a few of the courses that we will be teaching in 2020:

BCST 1073 – Building Your Digital Media Presence (an online, work on your own schedule each week, course starting in January)
BCST 1193 – Social Media Storytelling (an online, work on your own schedule each week, course scheduled to be offered in April)
BCST 0107 – Travel Writing: Your Journey from Branding to Monetizing your Travel Stories (stay tuned for a Summer intensive course offering)
BCST 0108 – Creating and Marketing your Own Web Series (stay tuned for a Summer intensive course offering)

Photographed by Ian Schneider, care of Unsplash.

More Coming on StoryToGo

Also keep your eyes peeled on StoryToGo, our contemporary media community as we’ve long been talking about offering mini online courses and tailored online and blended courses for organizations there. This is something that you will see launch in 2020 with more course offerings from us and our rich group of storytelling friends and colleagues.

If you have a course that you would love to see offered through StoryToGo, please let us know in the comments, and if you wish us to tailor create a course for your organization, please send us an email.