During my first semester at Ryerson, within the course Interdisciplinary Innovation taught by Diana Varma and Chris Ambedkar, I learned about the current market variation in Podcasting and how there was an unmet market. This spurred the idea of starting a podcast.
As part of Ryerson’s Master of Digital Media program, graduate students have the option to gain knowledge in specific areas where their interests have peeked. When there is no scheduled course for these interests, students are allowed to take a Directed Study.
A Directed Study is a course taken under the guidance of a single faculty member, where the student is required to provide or present a formal report, or deliverable, at the end of the semester. These courses are required to be approved by both the supervising faculty member and the program director.
With the idea of starting a podcast and having the ability to integrate it into my master’s degree, I proposed the idea to a fellow MDM student, Katelyn O’Brien. (You can find more information about Katelyn’s previous and current work here) She was very excited as it would allow us to both grow skills and be an excellent additional portfolio piece.
Over a month, we secured Diana Varma (more information about Diana here) as a fantastic supervisor and created the attached course outline.
Within this course, we identified three primary learning objectives: develop, execute and release.
We hope to develop an understanding of the audience and landscape by completing the Market and Production Research document and developing a Brand Guideline for our potential podcast.
We are opening to execute three podcast episodes and a midway self-reflection.
Through releasing these episodes, we will learn the recording, editing and releasing process.
I am very much looking forward to this process and will be keeping everyone updated.
-A
ANNA LANG 
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