Upcoming Workshops

Here are a few of our upcoming Digital and Interactive Media Courses and Workshops:

Photo care of Jamie W Cummings, via UnSplash.

Upcoming Scheduled Courses, Talks and Workshops

BCST 3073: Interactive Storytelling 

A Credited Online BCIT Course in Media Storytelling

There is a community and an audience online for just about every story, idea, and concept. The problem is that many people don’t know how to create their ideas online, and to build and engage a community around those ideas. That is what you will begin to build in this course – a storyworld around your digital media endeavours (whether for personal branding, business or a project). This will include utilizing WordPress to build a professional website, optimizing SEO to that website and an associated youtube channel, niche audience building, creation of and participation in a digital storytelling campaign, measuring social metrics, crowdfunding, crafting appealing email newsletters, and developing a long term strategy for continued community engagement.

  • 14 Weeks from January 4 – April 5, 2021
  • Instructor: Erica Hargreave
  • 3 Credits
  • Online on Your Schedule
  • CRN: 88595
  • $612.19

Always Available Courses

Immersive Experiences in Natural and Cultural History Education

An Open Access Course

Imagine being transported into an entirely new world, or see the world you know being transformed in fantastical ways: that is what immersive experiences can deliver. Traditional classroom learning can be restrictive and at times dull, but virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and mixed reality (MR) can offer transformative learning experiences that are novel, interactive, and exciting. There is nothing quite like the immersive experience that this media and these technologies offer.

Immersive media and technologies are an emerging and booming market that is becoming increasingly mainstream. There are applications in not only education, but also entertainment, healthcare, manufacturing, retail, and the list goes on. We will no doubt see these technologies all around us in the near future, and it only makes sense that the field of education should keep up with this technological trend.

For this OER, we are honing in specifically on immersive experiences in Natural and Cultural History Education, in order to provide focus for an otherwise substantial subject area. There are many examples of immersive experiences currently being created and utilized in this area, and we think that there is great potential in this area for the future. This serves as a great starting point for thinking about the inclusion of immersive experiences in other fields.

  • Available Anytime
  • Instructors: Johannes Wielenga, Yannick Wong, and Erica Hargreave
  • Online on Your Schedule
  • Free

Two Truths and a Lie : Media Literacy for Young Adults

An Open Access Course for use by Homeschoolers and Classroom Teachers

The internet is full of false information and ads. Sometimes it can be challenging to decipher the validity of content.

It is important to learn how to critically evaluate online material for several reasons:

  1. You want to know what type of information is trustworthy online.
  2. You want to be an informed digital citizen.
  3. You want to ensure that the information that you are using for a school assignment is factual.

The purpose of “Two Truths and a Lie Online” is to teach you how to critically evaluate online resources so that you can be both an informed consumer and producer of digital content. 

  • Available Anytime
  • Instructors: Deirdre Grace, Sarah McLean, Jeff Tan, and Erica Hargreave
  • Online on Your Schedule
  • Free

Relaxing Yoga with Lori

A Free Yoga Class to Break Up Your Work Day

Movement, screen breaks, and mindfulness are key to our health and for our minds to function effectively to learn, create, and be productive. As such, Lori Yearwood has created this free class, so that StoryToGo students can take a break from their studies to stretch, breath, and relax.

  • Available Anytime
  • Instructor: Lori Yearwood
  • Online on Your Schedule
  • Free

Elementari Tutorial – Learn to Write and Code Interactive Stories

An Open Access Course

Contrary to popular belief, it is possible for any of us to write and create beautifully illustrated stories complete with animated characters, music and sound effects. In addition to that, these stories can be interactive with clickable features. Cue the online platform, Elementari. Their mission promotes arts, literacy, and computational thinking in an engaging and collaborative way; pulling a community of artists, musicians and writer together. They want anyone, especially kids, to be able to write and code interactive stories. Throughout this course, our instructor Lori, will guide you through video tutorials on how to use the exciting features of Elementari so you will be able to complete your very own book!

  • Available Anytime
  • Instructor: Lori Yearwood
  • Online on Your Schedule
  • Free

Past Courses, Talks and Workshops from 2020 / 2021

Drawing Eyes and Building Awareness Around OERs

An Open Access Workshop

While the Open Educational Resource (OER) community does a wonderful job of engaging with one another online, open educational resources are difficult to find, much of the conversation and resource building is limited to academia, and the broader educational and content creation communities are unaware of OERs and the OER community. For OERs to become more mainstream, we need to engage educators and content creators beyond academia in the conversation. We need to stop limiting our conversation to educational silos defined by what type of institution or organization that we work within. In addition, we need to make OERs easier to find. While there are some wonderful initiatives happening to aggregate and spread OER content, like the OER World Map and Open Education Week, we need to look at ways to increase the conversation around OERs in an ongoing manner throughout the year, in conversations with the broader educational and content creation communities. By improving the visibility to platforms that are aggregating OERs and broadening the conversation around OERs into expanding network of educators, we make OERs easier to find, and hopefully encourage a broader group of educators and content creators to contribute OERs to OER aggregators.

Our goal in this session is to come together to start planning ways to bring OERs into broader conversations amongst educators and content creators.

  • Live in November 2020, Recording Available Anytime
  • Facilitated by Erica Hargreave with the assistance of Danielle Dubien
  • Open Access

StoryToGo : Building Global Connections, Opportunities and Sustainability in the Middle of a Pandemic

Sometimes it takes everything falling to pieces, to gain perspective and place your focus where your heart was telling you to. In our case and in the case of StoryToGo (a digital site designed to bring a global community of creatives together to explore and discuss storytelling today), it took a pandemic!

When the pandemic hit, we saw the world around us, especially online, start spiralling into a state of anxiety and fear. Our first instinct was, “we can help calm” – which we did with both open and free resources that we’ve been building over the past few years, and that others have built. When that immediate need settled, we realized that this was the time and space to finally be building the StoryToGo teaching platform. You see not only did we see a number of our colleagues in creative endeavours unable to do their regular work, but we also realized that courses around contemporary storytelling that help people to dream, create, and move forward is exactly what the world needs just now. This has made us dream bigger in the development of the StoryToGo Classroom site too, including kids programs, a health and wellness studio, a culture hub, and a teacher resource centre into this online educational site.

In building and strategizing, we have had a few goals that are important to us. They include having open and free courses, diversity (in courses and in instructors), being global with instructors and ideas from different parts of the world, and creating revenue and sustainability for our instructors. That last part means that not all of our courses are open or free, as our instructors cannot pay for their rent and food on goodwill alone, but everyone is contributing in some way to the open and free that we are building into the platform.

In this session we will explore strategies for building a teaching site and open educational resources sustainably with open technology, bringing a global community together around a shared vision, solutions to the development of open and free outside of institutions, and balancing the creation of open and free education with the financial sustainability of our instructors – both from our experiences with StoryToGo and that of the broader creative community throughout the pandemic.

An Open Access Talk

  • Live in November 2020, Recording Available Anytime
  • Talk by Erica Hargreave, Lori Yearwood, and Kevin Ribble
  • Open Access

Are You Asking? Accessibility of Open Educational Resources in Online Learning

Who decides what makes content accessible? Are we asking learners with disabilities what makes learning accessible to them, what is problematic, and what solutions work best?

It is our belief that educators need to listen more to learners with disabilities in order to create accessibility that meets their needs, rather than decide what is best for them.

While this is not a new problem when it comes to online learning, it has been highlight by educators’ sudden move to online learning environments during the COVID-19 pandemic. Add to this the minimal resources that creators of open educational resources face, and it is often all too easy to justify not taking the time to make resources accessible to all potential learners or to make broad decisions as to what will make a resource accessible without the input of learners with disabilities.

To address this issue, we are setting out to create a variety of open and free-to-access, educator focused resources that share the voices and experiences of learners with disabilities with online learning. Our goal is to support educators in making their online learning experiences universally accessible by asking and listening to learners with disabilities. The resources that we develop as a part of this project will include a vlogcast series on accessibility matters (sharing the voices, faces, and stories of the disabled community on what accessibility in open, online learning experiences means to them), case studies in the form of blog posts from the accessibility matters vlogcast, and themed open educational courses/units for educators on accessibility in online learning, starting with an open educational course on ableism and how to invite learners with disabilities into the conversation to create truly accessible education.

An Open Access Talk

  • Live in November 2020, Recording Available Anytime
  • Talk by Lori Jones and Erica Hargreave
  • Open Access

Animated Stories

An Online Summer Camp at BCIT

Enter the exciting world of interactive digital storytelling by creating animated books and stop motion videos. Learn to storyboard, create voice overs, experiment with soundscaping, play with coding, and discover how to transform your creations in the editing suite. In this online camp, campers will connect with each other and their instructors through interactive video sessions and a secure online camproom with discussion boards. Each day will include a morning and afternoon interactive video session, time to work on the day’s challenge with instructor guidance, and an exercise / relaxation session.

  • 1 Week Intensive Camp from July 27 – 31, 2020
  • 9 am – 2 pm PST / noon – 5 pm EST
  • Instructors: Lori Yearwood and Erica Hargreave
  • Live Online

Cheer Mission – Changing the Story

A Private Group Class

Storytelling is a powerful medium for doing good, spreading love and positive messages, and sharing cheer. In this 8-week class our cheer kids will join award winning storytellers and educators, Lori Yearwood (also a dancer) and Erica Hargreave (also a host and character actor) in exploring ways of sharing their stories with authenticity for social good. The cheer students will tune into a weekly 1-hour, interactive zoom class that will have them exploring different elements of storytelling and creating individually and together from afar. At the end of each week’s zoom, the kids will be given a challenge to work on for the week and will be invited to a private online classroom, where they can interact, plan, and share with one another, and problem solve with and ask questions of Lori and Erica.

  • 8 Week, Friday evening class from May to July, 2020
  • Instructors: Lori Yearwood and Erica Hargreave
  • 3 Credits
  • Live Online