We’ve written some notes to help answer questions our community often ask, from what makes our teaching different and why we teach online, through to payment plans and bursaries.
➡️ OUR TEACHING
If you’re new to online training or have only experienced face-to-face courses or Zoom learning, you may find our online courses a bit different. We offer a practical, three-dimensional learning experience using methods that mirror the creative process. This is different from the didactic model where an expert lectures a passive audience.
It’s about learning through doing, testing ideas with practical exercises and sharing work with your peers, who are fellow creative professionals. You work in a small group, led by a tutor and supported by a moderator, regularly reading and feeding back on the work of others. This tends to build a close-knit and productive community of disciplined and focused practitioners.
Why do we teach online?
An online training course is a distinct experience and is not designed to replicate face-to-face learning. We know from our decades experience of teaching that online courses offer many advantages and often faster progression than face-to-face study.
But not all online is the same. This isn’t learning by watching pre-recorded video lessons or joining Zoom sessions. While those can play a useful part in a learning journey, they don’t make for good teaching in themselves and can tend to make students a passive consumer rather than an active learner.
When you book a JYS training course, you join a supportive learning community of creative professionals on a bespoke digital platform. Then session by session you work on practical tasks to deadlines in a small group supported by a subject expert tutor and moderator.
There’s always plenty of room to ask questions, contribute to vibrant class discussions and engage in meaningful back and forth to discuss ideas, try out concepts, and share your work with participants from all over the world. This builds the trust and person-to-person connection that’s so essential in developing a fulfilling practice.
We have extensive experience in teaching online, having set up the world’s first fully online Master’s course in writing. We’ve tried out, tested and tweaked our methods for more than 12 years in recreational, academic and professional training; we know what you need to do in order develop effective skills and an independent practice suited to a rapidly changing world – and that’s what we deliver through our training. Find out more about our learning model.
What does CPD accredited mean?
You may have noticed that many of our courses are CPD accredited.
The CPD Certification Service is the world’s leading and largest independent CPD accreditation organisation. Our courses with the CPD badge have been independently accredited for integrity and quality. It reaches globally recognised CPD standards and benchmarks for active learning that develops professional skills, competence and career aspirations.
All students who complete one of our CPD certified courses will receive a Certificate of Completion evidencing their learning hours. Find out more about CPD accreditation and the feedback we have received.
➡️ BOOKING
What payment options are available?
You can pay the full course fee upfront or request a flexible and interest-free payment plan.
To request a payment plan, select the pay down-payment option at checkout. This down payment is non-refundable. We will be in touch to set up your plan and will collect your payment details through a secure link. Please do not send us your card details by email. Typically after making a down-payment, you can spread the balance of the fees over 3 equal monthly instalments.
The first payment will be taken within a week of you signing up, then monthly. You should complete (or nearly complete) your payment plan before your course starts. But if you sign up just before the start date, we’ll need your first instalment during the first module.
We may consider longer payment periods for special circumstances at our discretion. If you have any questions about paying in instalments, or concerns about paying your next instalment, please don’t hesitate to come talk to us: [email protected].
Can I get a bursary/scholarship for a course?
Yes, we support a number of bursary opportunities to help participant fund course costs, including in-house bursaries and third-party training bursaries through partners such as ScreenSkills and New Writing North.
Find our full directory of where to find training bursaries and application guidance here.
- Which courses offer bursaries?
Use the ‘bursary available?’ filter on our Story Training page to see which courses have bursaries attached. Applicable courses will also have a bursary section on their pages. This will explain what’s available and how to apply. Please note: it may take a number of weeks to apply for a bursary and be reviewed, so please make sure you apply ahead. - Letter of endorsement
Please contact us and we’ll be very happy to hold a place for you on the course while you work through the application process (no need to pay a down payment at this stage). If needed, we can provide you with a letter of endorsement to support your application – just let us know.
Once you’ve received your bursary, we can schedule payments to reflect how your bursary works. If you do not receive full financial assistance for the course, we do request that your contribution is made before the course begins. We understand that when bursary payments are made is not in your control, so are happy to re-schedule invoices if needed.
If you’d like to chat more about this, email the team at [email protected] .
➡️ YOUR LEARNING
When do I need to log-on? When do the sessions start?
On most of our courses that’s up to you! There’s no need to log in at a set time to take part – sessions open to a timetable and you have until the end of each session to work through the materials in the online classroom.
So you can read the tutor notes and listen to the podcasts, watch the videos, analyse extracts, react to prompts and work through mini-exercises at any time of day or night that’s best for you. You can also contribute to discussions on our forums 24/7, so the online classroom feels like a rich and lively shared experience.
Most people on the course fit learning around their work and caring responsibilities, which is why we teach in this non-synchronous way. It also suits those studying in another language or time zone, and offers advantages in terms of accessibility and different learning styles.
We ask that you submit your final exercise in each session by the deadline, then read and critique the work of some of your peers. If you want to know how many sessions each course has, check the course page and it will specify how many and how long each session lasts (often either a week or a fortnight).
If there are live Zoom sessions in your course, your moderator will let you know the timing. If you can’t make it, send in questions in advance and catch up with the recording afterwards.
Past sessions and any recordings remain available throughout the training – and in the alumni area afterwards – so you can revisit any of the learning, revise exercises and chart your progress at any point.
Please note: if you’ve signed up for a JYS course and you’re waiting to receive your login details, your course moderator will email all your access information over a few days before the course begins.
Peer learning – why do we teach in small groups?
Peer critiquing is a pedagogically sound method. We know that when students actively engage in critiquing they embed the learning more quickly and soundly – by actively putting those skills into practice. This is why we base our approach to teaching and learning around peer critiquing.
Critiquing others develops focus, self-confidence, good judgement and self-sufficient practitioners who can switch between their ‘creative’ and ‘editorial’ brains. Put simply, it helps you turn a sharper lens on your ideas and develop a keen eye for what works, and what does not.
It also helps to build a close-knit group you can trust to give you honest and insightful critiques, and support you through common hurdles, from lack of time to writer’s block. And while you can’t take your tutor with you after the course, you can take this group of supportive peers. Many of our alumni are still ‘meeting’ virtually to share their work many years after they completed their original course.
It’s extremely valuable to read feedback for fellow participants. The points raised will inevitably be relevant to your own work: if not now, then in the future. And since all feedback is available to everyone and is archived on the site, it’s easy to look back whenever you need to find tips that you can apply to your own work.
Quote from our Running the Show course director Jeff Melvoin: ‘One of the chief goals of the social constructivist approach to online education promoted by John Yorke Story is to provide multiple lenses on the same topic. We learn from each other and learn to appreciate alternative points of view. This class has succeeded admirably in building a community that fosters open, honest opinion with full regard for differing feelings and sensibilities.’
Can I learn ahead?
Each course is designed as a slow-burn process because we find that participants progress best when they work to incremental goals. So, we deliberately open sessions one-by-one to keep you focused on one session at a time.
Many people are keen to rush ahead, but it’s important to lay good structural and craft foundations – and the individual session goals are there to make sure you do just this.
In order to develop it’s important to identify your strengths and weaknesses, and hone your judgement of your ideas and skills. This happens more effectively if you follow the course sequentially and allow yourself gradually to build upon the skills developed in each session.
Who will teach me?
Everyone who teaches on our courses actively works in the industry.
They are also experienced online teachers, working on BA, Masters and MFA courses in universities and film schools as well as training professionals in the creative industries.Your course director (which is John Yorke on many of our courses) curates and oversees the learning. Then, your tutor guides you through the course materials session by session, giving feedback at key intervals, whether as written feedback, podcast recordings, more formal written reports, or as live Q&As on Zoom.
The course materials are regularly revised and developed in light of student responses – both in forum conversations, in work produced on the course, and from our formal survey at the end of each course.
Meet our experts
Find out more about John Yorke
What happens after?
After the training finishes, we’ll enrol you in our online alumni community – a hub for creative professionals sharing opportunities and supporting each other as they continue to explore and develop their work.
Access to the alumni area is included in your course fee. You’ll be able to keep accessing all your course materials (there’s no time limit on this) and working with your group in a private online area.
You can also join our regular writers’ rooms and networking events, as well as live Q&As with guest industry professionals.
Our alumni also receive a 10% discount on any other JYS course they’d like to join. Contact us to redeem: [email protected].
Looking for one-to-one mentoring?
Thanks for your interest in our mentoring scheme. We can offer sessions with Matt Telfer, who heads up our Script Development team and has masses of experience working with writers from ideas to finished draft and beyond.
Matt is happy to offer a one-off session or series of sessions on a project to your deadline. Every writer/editor is different, so we tend to tailor sessions as appropriate, but what usually happens is that you send work to the mentor for detailed written notes, then you’d meet for up to an hour on Zoom/phone to discuss.
With writers, we often use this structure:
- Mentoring session 1 – you submit a treatment for your idea.
- Mentoring session 2 – you submit an extended scene-by-scene breakdown
- Mentoring session 3 – you submit an extended scene-by-scene draft 2 (some people skip this stage)
- Mentoring session 4 – you submit a first draft script
With editors, this structure is popular:
- Mentoring session 1 – you submit Script A of your choosing, along with your HEADLINE notes (1-2 pages max). Matt feeds back – offering guidance, especially on prompt questions. He’ll focus on the notion of drilling into the script as an “example of the solution.”
- Mentoring session 2 – you read our training script and write up notes-to-self and notes-to-writer. Matt feeds back on your script report, focusing on story elements, act structure and John’s 25 top tips for approaching a script. Also looking at how to give notes in such a way as to get the most out of a writer.
- Mentoring session 3 – you submit script B of your choice, along with your FULL notes. Matt feeds back, again offering offering pointers and next steps.
Additional ongoing sessions if necessary.
Fee per session: £495 (inc VAT)
If this sounds like the kind of thing that would be useful, send us a message at [email protected] (with a bit of info about your project) and we can set up a call with Matt to discuss. Alternatively, our other tutors and industry experts also offer mentoring.
