Digital Media Academy

Digital Media Academy is a digital art and technology education company, located in Palo Alto, CA, and Vancouver, BC, primarily offering STEM summer camp and arts programs for students, age 9-18, at several universities in the US and Canada, including Stanford, Harvard, UCSD, Chicago, NYU, UBC, UoT, and more.^[1] Digital Media Academy Certified Schools offers curriculum and teaching resources to K-12 schools globally to empower every educator to integrate technology into their classroom in a way that works for them.

Digital Media Academy began as the Academy for New Media at Stanford University in the late 1990s as a program of Stanford's Academic Department and was officially incorporated in 2002. The Academy for New Media was created at Stanford by Phil Gibson in 1999 for K-12 educators and high-school students interested in learning the latest digital media software tools from award-winning creative professionals.^[2] Digital Media Academy was born in the Fall of 2001 after the Academy for New Media became closed due to budget cuts. Continuing Studies department offered CEU credits through Digital Media Academy from 2002-2014. In the Fall of 2017, the Company changed ownership, with Gibson exiting completely in 2018. Students may attend Digital Media Academy summer camps with the day camp or residential camp option or enroll in online courses.

Controversy[]

In the wake of the COVID-19 epidemic, Digital Media Academy was not providing refunds for cancelled camps according to its terms and conditions, which it updated in June 2020, well into the pandemic. The original terms and conditions had stated they would provide a refund.

Many angry parents were contesting the terms and conditions as can be seen on Yelp or other online review sites. The company had a class action that was dismissed against the individual but not the class. Health authorities policies were followed by the Universities partners (Stanford, Harvard, NYU, and all the others), cancelling all in person Tech Camps in 2020 and, according to DAM, also in 2021.

Despite its June 2020 updated terms and conditions of non-refund in case of force majeure, the company offered transferable full credit to all clients to be used during the Virtual Tech Camps 2021 season. The company emailed its credit holders in May 2021 that all credits would be canceled if unused by August 31, 2021 and they could only be used for remote options. The email also stated that DMA was aware that credit holders would not be happy with this outcome.

The vast majority of the clients that have used their credits for Virtual Tech Camps were very happy. The satisfaction surveys shows a 96.2% satisfaction rate. (Please cite source)

Partnerships[]

Digital Media Academy by a grant from The Nudelman Family Trust offers a 1,000 full scholarship program^[3] to make its courses accessible to underprivileged children and has partnered with various non-profit and community-focused organizations including the New Media Consortium^[4] and the .

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