When I began my classes for my M.S.Ed. in Instructional Technology (IT), I was often looked upon as an odd duck. Most of my classes were full of classroom teachers, school librarians, and administrators looking to be in charge of a different area. So here I was, a musician in their midst (and a jazz musician, no less), and when I would invariably be asked about what brought me to IT, I always answered, “I’m going to change the way we teach music.” I’ve widened the scope of my approach, and my research, to include everyone I serve at the University, but I still haven’t lost sight of that goal. But the problem isn’t in the discipline itself; rather, it’s in the materials and methodology.

In a previous life, I was a music professor, and tried as much as possible to leverage technology to improve my course materials and course delivery, and to facilitate better learning experiences for my students. However, these improvements tended to be hybrid instruction methods, such as online testing, audio or video lectures, online paper submission or discussion boards. They did make my course more efficient and created more hands-on class time for me, but did little to truly transform the learning experience in the classroom or outside of it. The students thought taking tests online, watching short video lectures, and doing lots of stuff online was “cool,” but as we all know, “cool” doesn’t really equate to a sea change in their learning. (This was over a decade ago, when doing anything online had way more sparkle than it does today.) Looking back on it after studying and practicing Instructional Design for several years, I see most of my former “innovations” are not really that groundbreaking, just repackaging of old lessons to take advantage of some tools I had available.

Music is a very analog discipline, no pun intended. There are many aspects of teaching and learning in music that require a physical presence or connection between the student and teacher, at least if they are to be the most productive. Private lessons often require an instructor to make physical contact with the student to correct posture, positioning, and breathing. I tried to teach guitar lessons online once, and it was a disaster; the things I would have been easily able to correct if I’d been right there were considerably more difficult to diagnose and fix when I was looking at a student over a webcam. If I can’t see clearly what the student is doing wrong, I may let them continue to do things incorrectly, and this may create more problems for both of us down the road. This is not to say that such things can’t work. On the contrary, there are numerous teachers who offer online lessons. Still, I think that every one of them would prefer teaching a student in their own studio to doing everything over video.

Similarly, there are “virtual ensembles” where players in multiple locations play together through synchronous Web connections have been successful in the past. Although, there remains a disconnect between players in this situation and sitting together in one room, or in an orchestra section, together. Large groups, and even small groups, benefit from the togetherness of real physical rehearsal time in a way that a video camera simply isn’t capable of producing. They also cannot fully appreciate the warmth of another instrumentalist’s playing as fully if it is being supplied through a digital rendering. Additionally, teaching how to read music is more effective in person, where teachers can provide immediate feedback and guidance, helping students to better understand dynamics and expression as they play alongside their peers.

For this reason, online video is an exciting addition to music classes, but it is also perhaps one of the biggest stumbling blocks out there. It’s great for lecture content, and to catalog recordings, but it still can’t provide the same closeness as physical presence can. Teaching hybrid or online music, then, becomes an enormous sorting process in which course materials are looked at, primarily in terms of delivery method. If a course will be primarily reading and writing, such as a music history class, it makes perfect sense to push as much online as possible. Readings can be done online, papers can be submitted online, grading can be done online, and listening examples and lecture materials can be handled with multimedia. Discussion boards can take care of student-student and teacher-student interaction, and so for a course like this, there’s no reason not to offer it totally online. In the case of a competency-based course, like music theory, aural skills, or conducting, a hybrid might make more sense. In this case, learning materials, reading, and assessments can occur online, and class sessions can take the form of a lab where students can practice the skills they have been working on individually. It also gives the instructor time to perform individual skill tests as necessary, since lecture time has been pushed online. Private lessons and ensembles are probably still primarily face-to-face interactions, although much more could be made of using an LMS to store and catalog scores and repertoire recordings, and to provide an interactive space for players of the same instrument/voice part to form a community with one another and share experiences.

We’re still at a pretty basic level of interaction here, though. So far, everything I have listed is an enhancement to a course, not a reframing of it. This is an uphill battle, because there is a mindset that those of us in IT in the Arts are very aware of. It is precisely because of the widespread assumption that “you can’t teach music online” that so many programs are coming late to the game, and so little innovation has been done beyond making basic Web resources for things we used to photocopy. The real question to anyone who teaches in a discipline like this is how to leverage technology in a way that is not simply a substitution, but how to use it to take us where we haven’t been before. This is not just about impressing the music professors with something that is really slick, but in finding them a better way to teach their classes that might happen to use technology.

Here’s a blue sky example that may or may not exist: virtual conducting lab. In the olden days when I was an undergraduate, we had to conduct musical excerpts in front of the class, using our classmates as the ensemble, and they would sing or play the parts as we conducted, working through the various beat patterns and gestures we were learning that week. We would each have our own VHS tape, on which our performance would be recorded, and we could go back, watch it and read critiques from the instructor. Well, we have pretty sophisticated virtual reality technology out there now. What about a way to eliminate the live ensemble time? A virtual reality app could potentially play the excerpt, being sensitive to the tempo set and its fluctuations, dynamics and the conductor’s gestures, and make a recording so the instructor would be able to watch it, examine the gestures you made and make an informed grading decision, without either person setting foot on campus. I wouldn’t personally say this should substitute for all of the real, hands-on practice, but it could definitely offer students more opportunities for feedback and improvement than they might get in a traditionally formatted class, where they might conduct in front of the class only every couple of weeks. That’s a game-changer, something that goes beyond simply reformatting the course materials. It would increase the amount of practice and feedback a student could receive without negatively impacting workflow, and use technology to make the process convenient. Best of all, it could allow the instructor to make real-time comments on the recording of the student, so there would be less confusion over anything the instructor wanted to call attention to or correct. Better feedback equals better performance later.

I do not think that it is impossible to create and deliver great online and hybrid music courses. But I do think that it’s a lot more difficult to do in an instructional setting like this, where a great deal of the learning is both competency-based and also relies greatly on physical interaction with space, time, and an instrument (or voice). There is less leeway to design something online that measures a competency, if it cannot easily be done with existing online tools. So this is the big challenge to all of you programmers, musicians, and professors in music, and in all the Arts in general: It’s time to disabuse ourselves of the notion that online teaching and learning is something “only other folks do,” or something that “won’t work for us.” It absolutely can, and it will, if we are willing to change our assumptions and work together to bring our discipline into a more modern era. Many other disciplines have been enjoying the results of hard time spent developing and refining online and computer-based tools for years now; isn’t it time we got a little taste of that excitement too?