Bournemouth University’s upcoming BSc (Hons) Esports Digital Technologies degree will have a specific focus on helping students gain work as independent freelancers and streamers.
The degree, which launches in September 2025, will cover ‘digital content creation, live streaming, event management, athlete management, entrepreneurship, data analytics and professional practice’.
Students will be given an understanding of freelancing, contracts and tax returns, in a bid to help navigate the contract issues often seen in esports.
Andrew Kitchenham, Bournemouth University’s Deputy Head of Department in Creative Technology, told Esports News UK: “We want to create rounded esports students, to help them with freelancing, tax returns and contracts. This concept of employability and professional practice is really important and often forgotten by other unis.
“It’s not just the skills and knowledge, it’s actually how do you then go forward and make an independent living. So we’re really keen that the students are commercially aware, prepared for employment, but also equally prepared for an umbrella self-employed freelance degree.
“Then, with our streaming stuff, we’ve gone for a different route. Many universities have got one or two really specialist studios. Talking to our students these days, they’re very much about hands-on experiential learning.
“So we wanted to have 18 HD high-tech booths where every student could be working in real time on the same gameplay. So we can feed a single player or a team’s video in and 18 students in real time can create their own live broadcast of that feed, with graphics and B-roll and voiceover.
“It’s very much about learning those skills, not just as content creation, but understanding how the basic building blocks fit together.”
Andrew Kitchenham, Bournemouth University
“We could throw our students a box of kit and cables and say, “set this up and run it”. And that to me is the difference between a BSC degree and a BA. BA students are really good about the content and the artistic focus, but when something doesn’t work, they’re often stymied and lost. Our kids will have the technical problem solving ability to put together a streaming rig for an event.
“Our degree’s envelope is esports. The skillsets and the attributes and the personal qualities that it’ll engender and support from the students to develop lead to a multitude of degrees – and I think higher education has to move away slightly from converging degrees that end up with one role at the end of it, and you’re trained for all these years and you can do this and it’s a very narrow high level skillset. We’ve got to be building degrees that lead to a range of portfolio of skills that can lead to many different employment opportunities, because that’s the nature of the workplace now.”
Professor Fred Charles, Head of Department for Creative Technology, added: “On the ability aspect that you mentioned, we’ve learned over the years with our other two games courses that the games industry – or at least the games technologies – are now involved in so many different applied industries, including film and beyond.
“So that knowledge, and it was part of our thinking to start with, is where esports fits on the outside of our games courses. So how do we fit all this together and ensure that there is sufficient breadth of knowledge, as well as for them to have the flexibility to make their own choices.”
Bournemouth University teams up with Top-Tec for esports degree
Gaming workstations and furniture company Top-Tec has recently published a case study featuring Bournemouth University here.
Top-Tec installed the gaming space at the university, with an art mural and colour scheme that ‘diverted from the traditional darker esports environment to something much more colourful, vibrant and inspirational for the students’.
Each streaming hub booth for a student features custom mounting brackets for PCs, space for two monitors, and mounts for cameras and microphones.
There’s more info on the Bournemouth University BSc (Hons) Esports Digital Technologies page here.
Dom is an award-winning writer and finalist of the Esports Journalist of the Year 2023 award. He has almost two decades of experience in journalism, and left Esports News UK in June 2025.
As a long-time gamer having first picked up the NES controller in the late ’80s, he has written for a range of publications including GamesTM, Nintendo Official Magazine, industry publication MCV and others. He also previously worked as head of content for the British Esports Federation.
