elearning for music

It is a time of tremendous change in education and music. I guess it always is, but the here and now feels particularly exciting. I find that what I want to do – the work I feel passionately about – and what I have time to do don’t match up, let alone juggling work with time I can have with my precious family.

So I have decided to resign my current teaching post (2.5 days a week) in the summer to concentrate on aspects of work that I want to focus on as my specialisms; string arranging and elearning. The former continues to grow and the latter I just can’t get enough of, though I’m not sure how I can turn my passion into employment.

I’ve found Moodle to be a fantastic course environment which has certainly extended learning beyond the confines of the classroom and timetable, promoted peer and self evaluations, assisted with evidence building through electronic portfolios, as well as making best use of interactive formative and summative assessment and digital media (particularly video recordings of every practical session). My reflections are here.
But social tools (with features beyond the current infrastructure of Moodle) mean the learning process as offered by an institution can and must change, through self publishing, communities of interest, discussions and collaborations. I’m currently involved with the SPLICE project making extensive use of the Ning platform. The cultural change required to truly embrace digital tools is enormous and I don’t underestimate the  task, but that is something I want to do, and, indeed, I can’t stop myself doing it!

So, my plan is, to retain (hopefully) some part time teaching and develop involvement with institutions where I can specialise in elearning for music and bring about change for both teachers and learners.  I need to explore funding as the sort of role I believe would bring value to a department (I’ll call it etutor for now) is not yet typically part of the strategy.

I have, through practice and my personal CPD activities been a voracious learner in the past few years, following an exponential curve in my experiences of elearning in my subject area.  Even though my professional musical work seems to be taking over, I most certainly don’t want to lose my involvement with music education.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 7th, 2008 at 12:12 pm and is filed under elearning, music and. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.