Family businesses are the backbone of our economy—not just in Canada, but around the globe. Despite being the most common type of ownership structure, family businesses are often the most complex; relationships between family members can become strained, especially if emotions take over, causing challenges that can affect the bottom line. In this course, family business participants examine the importance of cultivating their own emotional intelligence (EQ) to achieve greater business success. While the course focuses primarily on next-generation successors, it also provides elders with an opportunity to explore their own experiences in order to help sustain healthy family business relationships, especially during transition periods from one generation to the next. In addition, the course provides family business advisors with a deeper understanding of how EQ will help them communicate more effectively with their family business clients.

How can storytelling promote social change? This course develops skills for using stories to deliver messages that affect audiences and shape attitudes for social change. Learn how building empathy and developing characters can offer multiple perspectives on complex problems. Social change happens when listeners or viewers identify with messages delivered through a protagonist they identify with. Theatre artists and professional storytellers offer expertise about how to craft a story that develops empathy and delivers impact. You will watch video interviews with storytelling experts, view performances, and write your own story for social change. See how stories told from diverse perspectives contribute to understanding new perspectives about pertinent world issues. Learn how effective storytelling can be your tool for change. This course is for anyone who wants to effectively tell an impactful story. This includes (but is not limited to): Professionals working in not-for-profit or commercial sectors Entertainment industry development teams Writers and arts enthusiasts Community workers and social activists Marketing and development teams Educators and public speakers Customer service representatives Please check out the course preview video in YouTube!

With a solid plan and time for revision, most writing tasks can be completed with ease. This course is for those interested in improving their professional writing. Learn how to improve your writing’s organization, logic, and style so that whatever kind of writing your work requires, you can get your point across eloquently and quickly. This course will delve into the mechanics of the writing process: identifying an audience, choosing the best structure, and revising early drafts of your work. You will build confidence as you practice planning documents, using organizational strategies such headings and subheadings, and finding misused words and proofreading errors.

Unconscious bias—everyone has it. But that doesn’t make us bad; it makes us human. While we cannot completely rid ourselves of unconscious bias, we can learn how to recognize it and lessen its impact in the workplace. These are skills that everyone can learn. You may not be aware of how your unconscious biases can affect your behavior, but unchecked, it can have enormous impact in the workplace and throughout your everyday life. Unconscious bias causes people to unintentionally favor some groups—often ones that are like them—over others. This can lead to differences in who gets hired and recruited, who gets offered new opportunities, and whose voice is listened to. Understanding and mitigating the impact of unconscious bias is a crucial 21st-century global leadership skill. With awareness of unconscious bias and actionable steps to manage it, you will be able to make the best decisions for your organization, your colleagues, and your team. Managing unconscious bias is a vital step in building workplaces that are innovative, dynamic, and inclusive. In this training, through research-based assessments and exercises, you will move from awareness to action, learning how to interrupt bias and leverage the full potential of diverse teams and colleagues in your workplace. For learners at all organizational levels, from all industries, backgrounds, and geographies, thistraining will help you understand what unconscious bias is and introduce you to some necessary skills to counter its negative impact. The course is taught by instructors with extensive expertise advising and counseling major global companies on strategies to build high-performing and competitive workplaces. Learning these important leadership skills can help you to build and sustain inclusive workplaces and turn diversity into a strategic business advantage.

Using examples of investigative and crusading journalism from Asia, Africa, Latin America and Europe, this course will help you understand how raising public awareness can create political and social change. This course is a fast-paced introduction to global muckraking, past and present, and includes penetrating interviews with historians and investigative journalists. Join us to discover the vital role that journalism has played in fighting injustice and wrongdoing over the last 100 years and delve into the current trends reshaping investigative reporting in the digital age.

Although there are some robots you might never get to meet (or might hope you never meet), such as those sent to space, war or rescue situations, many other robots and bots are being developed to populate people's homes, the online spaces they frequent, their workplaces, and the social spaces they visit. This course explores how people communicate with robots and bots in everyday life, both now and into the future. Module 1 discusses the difficulties of defining what a robot is, as well as briefly introducing bots. Module 2 focuses on bots, chatbots and socialbots in detail, to consider how people communicate with these programs in online spaces, as well as some ethical questions these interactions raise. Robots in the home are the subject of Module 3, with a discussion of robots designed to act as personal assistants leading into some examples of assistive and care robots, as well as telepresence robots that allow people to interact with one another at a distance through a robot. Module 4 considers robots at work, from the potential of telepresence robots to enable remote operations, to robots designed to share people's workspaces, and potentially even take their jobs. One example of a public space where robots might alter people's working and social lives greatly is on the roads with the development of self-driving vehicles, robots that need to be able to communicate with their passengers as well as with other road users.

This course is part of the University of Cambridge’s MicroMasters program in Writing for Performance and Entertainment Industries. We will be looking in depth at how to build a screenplay that communicates its central meaning through strong visual images. How do we write a script containing almost no dialogue? And when we do have to use speech, what constitutes successful dialogue for the screen? How will film genre and history influence your writing? What is the difference between a tagline and a logline? How do you write an effective outline of your script for a producer to read? What is a ‘story bible’ and when do you need one? All these questions and more will be answered. We will be thinking comparatively about screenplay advice from film and TV industry gurus such as Robert McKee and John Yorke - as well as asking you to find your own habits and practices as writing methodology. We will critically analyse the work of filmmakers such as Jeremiah Mosese, Mustashrik Mahbub and Melina Matsoukas. How do our global film and TV industries reflect our social and cultural concerns and needs today? The work of James Frey ( Queen and Slim ), Michaela Coel ( I May Destroy You ) and Phoebe Waller-Bridge ( Fleabag, Killing Eve ) will inspire us to find the stories within ourselves than can change the world. Successful visual communication is a vital skill in any workplace. Visual images are the fastest way to communicate the most information possible in the shortest possible time, and a strong intuitive and strategic grasp of this process will offer you an in valuable creative toolbox for expert communication in any professional sphere. Skill transferability, flexible thinking, and expert language abilities are now essential in a diversifying global job market - come and learn essential new skills, and have fun doing it! You will be set writing exercises over the course of the module, and you will asked to keep a brief creativity journal to note how your ideas progress and how your intuition leads you into productivity. By the end of this module, you will have completed several new scenes of a screenplay, with a considered plan for the structure of the entire piece of work. You will have reflected on how social and cultural mores can become useful themes to create commercially successful work.

This course is part of the University of Cambridge’s MicroMaster’s program in Writing for Performance and Entertainment Industries. How can you utilise the innovative creative world of online digital platforms to advance and create new material as dramatic writers? We will be looking in depth at how to find an digital form that stimulates you as a writer. Do you want to write interactive gameplay ‘script’ for the video game industry? Or learn how to write soundscapes for radio drama and podcast plays? Perhaps you want to create new content for your own YouTube channel? We will be looking at how narrative skill and digital production coincide in all these mediums. We will consider successful professional examples of digital narratives; look deeply into the changing form of scriptwriting in the video game industry, as well as acquire a knowledge of how to reach a target audience online. This is a comprehensive introduction to writing and innovating digital content. Learning to write for online platforms, and how to communicate most effectively with an online audience, is now an highly transferable skill for any profession. Digital expertise, flexible thinking, and expert storytelling abilities are now essential in a diversifying global job market - come and learn essential new skills, and have fun doing it! You will be set writing exercises over the course of the module, and you will asked to keep a brief creativity journal to note how your ideas progress and how your intuition leads you into productivity. By the end of this module, you will have completed several pieces of script in a range of digital mediums of your choice.

This five-week course will help you identify reliable information in news reports and become better informed about the world we live in. We will discuss journalism from the viewpoint of the news audience. Together, we will examine the following topics: What makes news? The blurred lines between news, promotion and entertainment. Why does news matter? Social sharing and the dynamics of the news cycles. Who provides information? How to evaluate sources in news reports. Where is the evidence? The process of verification. When should we act? Recognizing our own biases. How do we know what we know? Becoming an active news audience. If you are interested in becoming a more discerning news consumer, please join us and sign up today.

Strong leadership is regarded as one of the best predictors of organizational success and critical human capital required for career progression in almost every organization. However, leadership is also a highly complex and often misunderstood phenomenon. It‘s hard to define, but we all know good and bad leadership when we see it. This course will equip aspiring leaders with an understanding of what leadership is and how an individual can develop the skills required to become an effective leader in their organization. Taught by instructors and presenters with decades of business and not-for-profit leadership experience, you will learn the difference between leadership and management, the importance of understanding others and building empathy and relationships, and gain a better understanding of the different leadership styles you may encounter throughout your career. Learn through a series of engaging videos, interviews, case studies, written reflections, peer feedback, and other self-insight activities. Our instructors and faculty will help you identify your own values and ethics as a leader, and most importantly, build your self-efficacy, your confidence and belief in your own ability to achieve intended results.