We're really lucky at the Shakespeare Institute, we've had some sort of distance learning program
for the better part of 20 years, and for the last decade it's been all online, or online accessible.
That sometimes surprises people because we are quite a small, and in many ways traditional place,
that we have this forward-looking approach to teaching, but it's been something that's
really important to us for a long time, because we've wanted, of course, to have students come to
us in Stratford-upon-Avon to share their love of Shakespeare and to learn more, but also to
be able to reach out around the world, and we want to recognize the fact that people are in
all different walks of life and they may not might not be able to relocate, but they do want to take
their study of Shakespeare and their engagement with his works to another level and in this case a
master's level. So we have a range of programs um and some of them have been around for a long time,
and some of them are new but at the core is again an engagement with Shakespeare's plays
and, and also those plays in performance, their afterlives and for our programme that
focuses on education, how those plays are taught in the classroom at various levels
around the world. In terms of teaching format we use a platform called Canvas which is an online
program that allows us to share lots of different kinds of teaching materials with our students,
and also to engage with them in real time. So with our modules which is our word for courses
we put a selection of different units online and there are readings that we ask students to do,
there are activities, there are discussion questions,
we have discussion boards where students can talk with one another and their teachers
in their own time, so kind of checking in when suits them over the course of a week or two,
and we also now offer optional online seminars where students can come together in real time
using video conferencing with their instructors to talk about the week's readings and sessions.
We encourage our students to be as active as they can be, but we also recognize that
students especially distance learning students who are studying part-time, are usually juggling
a lot of different kinds of life commitments, so a lot of them are working full or part-time,
a lot of them have caring responsibilities whether that's children parents other friends and family,
so while we have a framework that everyone works through together we do allow people to work at
their own pace within that framework. So we try to be as flexible as we can be while also encouraging
a kind of real-time interactive community. And just a final few words about our students.
They come from all over the world. We've had students from every continent around the world
other than Antarctica, we've, in terms of some of the countries we have a lot of students from
the United States, from Canada, we also have had students from Uruguay,
from, certainly from Australia, China and the list could go on, continental Europe.
We also of course have a lot of students in the UK because even if someone's in the UK it doesn't
mean they can move to Stratford-upon-Avon, so we have students all around this country.
Some of the students are able to come see us on site for part of their course, but many of our
distant students always study at a distance, and it's totally up to the student how that works.
Whether they're online or on-site, we very much consider our dl students part of our community,
and we try to make that really clear that we are a blended hybrid community,
and in fact we've been one like that for a really long time. Um, we have a lot of equipment in our
rooms to try to make as many sessions as possible accessible to all of our students,
and our students also come from a wide range of professional backgrounds - we have
a lot of students who are teachers, secondary, primary, further education in countries all around
the world, we also have a lot of students who are theatre practitioners, directors, writers, actors,
but we've also had students from what seem like completely different fields who just have
a deep love of Shakespeare. We've had doctors, actuaries, lawyers. everything you can think of,
and we really welcome that diversity because it makes the program what it is. And the last thing
I'd say is that we have students of all different ages. I think sometimes when people are thinking
about study they think oh that's something you do at this time in life, but actually
we have students who are just out of university or training programs, we also have students right
through to their retirement years and everything in between. So really that kind of diversity is
something we really embrace, and it's something that makes our programs as strong as they are.