The bottom line for running courses is enrolment, retention and achievement. Does the course attract students, do they stay on it, do they get the qualification? This is a target – if you don’t meet it then the course should not run.
My course (a National Certificate in Music) has had its ups and downs! There have been years where I have met the target but this last year I did not. I only enrolled 11 (should be 16), 3 left and of the remaining 8 only 7 will achieve the full qual.

There are lots of reasons for missing this target but the target was mine so I take the rap for not meeting it. It’s a statistic and they don’t come with explanations or mitigating circumstances.
I hope to still keep some teaching role, but not the course co-ordinator role that is primarily a bums on seats task.

So what have I achieved? According to the statistics, not a lot! But I’m allowing myself to look beyond those. Elearning has been (and will continue to be) a passion and I am proud of my own learning in this area and being able to use so many new web tools and services to support learning.
Creative activities; I believe my learners have had an excellent experience in developing their arranging and writing skills, through musical creation activities.
Progression; I’ve kept in touch with many ex-students (through this blog, the ccmmusic network, Facebook and Myspace) and I have a kind of paternal pride in seeing their development – not only if they have progressed in a music career, but progression in life and learning.
Music career guidance – a strong connection between the course content and real work opportunities. And therein lies one of the reasons I’m resigning; I do like to practice what I preach and because of that I learned so much about how I could develop my own musical (non-teaching) career that my freelance work is taking over.

Consolidate your skills and knowledge, keep learning, plan areas to develop, promote and network, use the social web to build your business, self-publish and discuss.  That’s the way to do it!

So what is my take on what a popular music course should look like?
The most successful students (the ones who have got the most from it) have been those with a direct purpose; they are in a band or are performing solo and have a pressing need to develop this. The course is vocational so it should be work-based – work related. Generally (though not exclusively) if a student is just a bedroom musician, not in a band, not doing gigs, not getting involved in the music scene, then they lack the motivation to study. They are amateurs, with a love for music, but not necessarily a love for study and a hunger to work in the music industry.
Beware prejudice! A learner that comes with a disdain for any music other than their niche will be reluctant to embrace multi-skilling. Diversity is a necessity I believe; look for a variety of career development routes in music to keep options alive. It is not enough just to ‘play my guitar’. Being a self-employed musician is a cottage industry where the individual is responsible for everything. The more you have to rely on others for skills and services, the less money you’ll keep for yourself and the less control you will have over your own progress. There will come a time in your career when you will need the specialist skills of others; keep things in your own garden as long as possible!
Sure, the course will have practical activities, band work, but that should be only a spring board to a learner putting new skills and knowledge into practice in their own situation.
I still believe that music language is crucial – theory and aural. We’ve been running the Popular Music Theory grades and these are excellent – possibly the most appropriate music theory books available. Only failing is that they are purely theoretical in terms of the immediate need to pass the exam. The book is littered with references to practical music making, but these do not form part of assessment.

Creative activities that respond to parameters are a great way to promote experimentation and I would put these at the core of the course. This worked well for Arranging and Composing modules.

Digital creative skills; I probably place more emphasis on this than on anything musical! The social web solves that historical problem with musicians of ‘not being found’. Whether they are looking for other musicians to work with, or promoting a particular musical skill (their musical identity) or promoting their band, the social web provides the space, tools and services to do it.

And the ability to use this environment is crucial; the digital skills to produce content (audio, video, images, design and text) and the academic skills to self-publish and network socially in a way that relates to career development.
The online social networking and self-publishing skills have a direct correlation with ‘old school’; meet people, get to know them, establish a mutual relationship, support your peers, have your say, promote yourself. Whether in a physical space or online, many of the facets are the same.

This may be my last blog post on here, as I am concentrating on my blog as a musician at realstrings.com , though I hope to still be actively involved in the fantastic discussions on online about music education.

UPDATE I’ve deleted the dizzler player in this post as it auto-plays an audio track which is really annoying!  It doesn’t do the same thing where I’ve embedded it at ccmmusic.ning.com.

Over night mails came from Ken Lewis (producer based in New York), asking about a sample recreation, Jen (my agent in Toronto) about Samplebase (Los Angeles) and an enquiry about strings (from Moscow).  There were notifications about discussions on the student social network I run (a Ning service) where John Blaylock (singer and writer for International One – now signed and recording debut album) was the guest host.  He totally rocks!  A band in Los Angeles were also enquiring about strings – found me with a google search.  Ken Lewis later agreed to trade some string work for a guest host slot on CCM Music (that is quite a coup!).

I spent the morning answering mails and prepping a presentation about web tools for learning, for staff at Mid Cheshire College.  A quick bit of fiddle practice (trying to get some jazz standards together with guitarist Jason Brown) then off to do the presentation (always a bit stressful) and found out more about the new Creative and Media diploma which is embracing the convergence of skills that all CI practitioners need to wake up to.  As part of the event, we posted a comment on Ken Lewis’s blog – his blogging is a great example of how to reach out from a website, not just present information.

Email updates also about some UK work – a hip-hop project, a movie (my old friend and extraordinary composer Richard Mitchell) and recordings for radio idents.

I’m chipping away at a long term project for Tim Duncan – preparing arrangements and scores for an ice ballet (to be recorded in Moscow end of May), so managed to put some hours in on this.

I just wanted to capture the satisfying feeling of all the bits falling into place!

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.

He’s set up some parameters to get a music education blogger ‘in the club’ (like 2 posts per month and contribute to conversations elsewhere) but I don’t think he’ll be sending the boys round if you miss your targets. This got me reflecting on my own online activity of late; I crashed and burned a few months back when my laptop died. I had no backup of rss and podcast feeds and I’ve been playing catchup ever since. But also my ‘portfolio’ of online activity is now much more disparate than just a single blog.  My string arranging blog, a few wikis, a few more nings (including 2 I manage for student activity) and my institution’s Moodle areas.  (Not to mention Facebook and Myspace)  And then I’m dabbling with Twitter.  So, in my defence your honour, that’s why posts in this blog have been thin on the ground!  But I love being part of the global conversations, ‘cos talking is good!

Here are Joe’s parameters:

1. You must have (or have started) a blog site and not a simple website. 
2. You must agree to post 2 or more posts per month about a topic that is interesting to you, your students, the music audience as a whole, etc. that related to music education and/or music technology in the classroom environment. Literally, you can almost blog about anything related… the “world is your oyster!”
3. You must agree to not “covet” your materials and share them with the world under a creative commons license (your pick!).
4. You must actively participate in our “global conversation” about our field by joining in the conversation with others:
   1. Agreeing to comment on two others ME Bloggers posts per month
   2. Share your blog with others by linking to the other ME Bloggers in either your blogroll or a page of ME Bloggers
   3. Agreeing to answer legitimate quesions by ME Bloggers and others that post questions on your site in a timely manner.
5. Let me know you exist!  Comment after this post, or visit our contact page!
6. When you become an ME blogger, post about our campaign as much as you want, tell your friends…we know this is going to be a long haul…let’s take the first step together!

I reckon I’m doing OK with most of those (as long I can include blog posts beyond this blog) – just need to blog roll and rss my disparate online activity in one place, and subscribe to the other group bloggers and get talking!

Latest project is a re-useable object for making formative music language exercises. The exercises aren’t that exciting but the ease of creation is. To make a new exercise I just edit questions and answers in a text (XML) file and the exercise name in another text (PHP) file and I have a new test, with auto-marking and data submitted to me – sweet! I’m going to ask for some updates but the files work fine as they are. Once you have the template (which I can provide) and a tutorial on editing (which I will do) each test takes just a few minutes to make!
basic scales 1

basic scales 2

chords 1

chords 2

We make music because we love it, but making a living at it is kind of useful. The income streams in the music industry are in turmoil as the net changes the face of society, so what is the new model to keep us employed?
Is it ad-supported music? I’d like to see artists and advertisers thrash out a cunning plan that will satisfy them both. Who’s up for it? Or is this a no-brainer and we should be looking elsewhere, or doing nothing?

If you trawl round music news and blog sites, you’ll see a common theme – folks don’t want to pay for tunes anymore. There’s file sharing, and on-demand social broadcasting in the shape of YouTube, Last FM and others. Voices in the music industry paint a bleak picture of impoverished artists (and record labels) but I’m not convinced it’s that bad yet. However, there is a shift in how money flows in and out of the music industry.

How about a track with advertising in it (on it, round it, up it). That’s not as crass as it may sound; look at the arty quality of cinema ads or the power of product placement or sponsorship. And consider how many ads licence songs as soundtracks.  Your song doesn’t have to start with ‘For a whiter smile use Colgate toothpaste…..take it away boys’ …but then again….

Increasingly, a song exists with a video and visual imagery is a more ‘arty’ form of advertising than the spoken word (believe me, I worked in radio advertising in a former life).

So how do we find a winning formula? Something that satisfies the artist (profile and payment) and the advertiser (profile and sales). Not a quick fudge, but a radical approach to a problem that definitely needs solving. I’d like to facilitate experiments between artists and advertisers; I don’t know how exactly how, but please join the debate.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

To explore ad-supported music further, here are some links to blogs and music sites already in the game.

pete gabriel’s site www.we7.com

www.macnn.com
(is iTunes getting interested in advertising?)

SprialFrog – only in the USA/Canada

www.marketingvox.co Napster and ads.

The AVC blog talks about the free music business – the best internet business models are free to users, income is from advertising.
An interview in the Times with Peter Gabriel who talks about his advertising-funded download site and on the BBC website.
Techcrunch – make money from gigs rather than recordings.
An article in The Independent about the changing face of the music business.

www.bubblegeneration.com

fan-force.com/blog

A site for info (and a daily newsletter) is http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/

Mark Cohen has got further than most in looking at ad-supported music at ad-supported-music.blogspot.com/
His blog Includes a list of Ad-Supported Music Companies

• Lirix, Inc.
• Qtrax
• SpiralFrog
• Ruckus Network
• Napster
• Intent MediaWorks
• We7
• Slacker
• Zaziggy
• imeem