Privacy Policy

Personal Information

We collect personal information from you, including information about your:

  • name
  • contact information
  • computer or network
  • billing information
  • Any information you provide in the course of participating in our classes and events. 

We collect your personal information in order to:

  • enable your participation in our classes, maintain our business records including issuing invoices and GST filings, and send you communications like our newsletter. 

Besides our staff, we share this information with:

  • your instructors and Mailchimp in order to enable them to teach our classes and so you can receive our newsletter.
  • A range of third party software applications including Google, Xero, and Mailchimp
Mandy Henk

Mandy has been teaching and learning on the margins of the academy for her whole career. As an academic librarian, she’s worked closely with academics, students, and university administrations for decades. She taught her own courses, led her own research work, and fought for a vision of the liberal arts that supports learning and teaching as the things that actually matter. 

Our vision for learning

Learning takes hard work, but it should be satisfying, engaging, and learner driven. It should build connections and community, enrich our inner lives, help us live better together, and create a sense of vibrancy that gives us meaning and a sense of direction.

If you want to understand why the world is how it is, how people have changed the world in the past, or why things seem to be as they are–this is your place.

For us, connection is key. Dark Times Academy takes a relational approach to education. It’s about connection. Connections between students and teachers, students themselves, and between our teachers. There’s no grading, no competition, and this is no place for ego.

Humility, care, and mutual respect guide our learning philosophy.

Classes

We love technology, but we prefer to use technology to facilitate connection and interaction–not to enrich Silicon Valley billionaires or steal the work of creatives. This relationship to technology is reflected in our pedagogical model.

All of our online classes are centred around weekly Zoom classes that include in-depth discussion and activities. This lets our teachers teach and our learners meet each other and build a learning community. To further encourage interaction, each class also has a moderated Signal group chat to share resources, keep the discussion going, and get to know each other!

The interactive portions of each course are supplemented by a short pre-recorded weekly lecture from your instructor or a guest lecturer and a weekly curated list of readings, podcasts, and videos. You can do the readings now or you can save them for later. It’s up to you! Our classes are a judgement and anxiety-free zone–you can decide what you put in and what you get from each class. 

Many of our classes also include an optional final project you can work on (or not!) to help you build a skill, engage more deeply, or just create something for the joy of creation. 

Providing some information is optional. If you choose not to enter your name, email address, or other personal information, we’ll be unable to support your participation in our classes or at our events or communicate with you.

We keep your information safe by  relying on robust third party systems like Google and Mailchimp and doing our best to protect your privacy. We also request that our instructors use Moodle to email whole classes to reduce the risk that they reveal the whole class’s email addresses to each other.

You have the right to ask for a copy of any personal information we hold about you, and to ask for it to be corrected if you think it is wrong. If you’d like to ask for a copy of your information, or to have it corrected, please contact us.

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