The World Wide Web offers instructors an excellent vehicle by which they may distribute instructional materials to classes at their own universities or to any location in the world. Current technology allows one to present text, graphics, and audio files to students. And, due to the capability to link each document to many others, courses can follow linear or non-linear sequences, or they can be structured hierarchically so that the student’s own knowledge suggests the path they follow through the instructional material.² This type of online presentation also fits the vision of many university administrators: courses can be offered at a distance to students at any location at a reduced cost, a situation that offers a way for schools to expand their shrinking enrollments.

But when preparing a course for presentation on the Web, one encounters many unforeseen challenges. The course must be designed with many different variables in mind: the type of information being presented, a format for presenting the syllabus and class information, effective online navigation through this material, and so on. In addition to these rather obvious problems, though, are a host of others less apparent. For example, how is the course to be advertised or listed? If it is a regular course offering, then how do students in other locations register for it? And, after investing the enormous amount of time necessary for this type of endeavor, who ultimately controls the rights to the online material? In my essay I will attempt to address some of these issues based on my own experience in preparing my junior-level Music 320 class–Form and Structure of Twentieth-Century Music–as a distance learning course on the World Wide Web. Hopefully, this paper will stimulate further discussion about the various facets of this type of presentation in today’s university setting.

The first step in preparing a course for the Web is to determine by the course content the best type of presentation. In a website for a music skills or fundamentals course, for example, one might choose to include musical examples, interactive drills, and perhaps sound files to play the musical examples. Careful attention to the order of the material is necessary, since certain key concepts must be mastered before students can proceed. If, however, the course focuses on music history, the pages might instead emulate a lecture presentation in conjunction with sound clips, graphics, musical examples, and so on. And, a sophomore- or junior-level music theory course might take advantage of both modes of presentation: musical examples, sound clips to play them, and a lecture format to present the instructional materials.

In my Music 320 class, I considered the course content very carefully before deciding upon a format for the course. A theory course on 20th-century music must necessarily incorporate aspects of theory and history, since compositional trends occurring late in the century sometimes defy the usual pitch-based analysis we perform with tonal or atonal music. The order of presentation is less important than with basic skills classes, but there are certain topics, such as set theoretical or twelve-tone concepts, that must be presented prior to studying pieces structured around those principles. In this type of course, sound clips can be useful, but I generally deal with entire pieces for which sound files would be very large. In addition, the issue of copyright permission is still a gray area. Some feel that inclusion of recorded examples on a website with restricted access falls under the educational fair use clause in current copyright laws. Others recommend gaining copyright permission before placing commercial recordings on the web, particularly when including entire pieces.

The format I decided upon for my class took all these factors into account. First, to present instructional material I chose a lecture, or lesson, format, which resulted in a series of lecture-style pages to introduce basic concepts and detailed analyses of selected works. I compiled these lessons into an online text entitled "Twentieth-Century Music: Lessons and Analyses."³ Each lesson included text, musical examples, graphs, diagrams, and so on. Because of copyright concerns, however, entire scores were not displayed on the web pages. Instead, I decided to have students purchase the appropriate scores for the class directly from the university bookstore. This tactic also allows students to make notations directly in their scores while they read each lesson, something that would be impossible with an online presentation. The lessons emulate as much as possible my own in-class presentation of the course material, and I included throughout the lessons study questions for students to answer on their own. I decided to avoid the problem of large sound files and copyright issues altogether by leaving the responsibility for listening to the pieces up to each student and instead suggested recordings for them to use. This solution works fine with my course, since listening to each piece, while highly recommended, is not absolutely necessary to grasp the theoretical concepts being presented. Of course, this type of approach is not without its problems: if students take a course with listening requirements near their own campus, then a well-stocked music library will probably have recordings of all included works. Or, students can purchase recordings of the selected works, an expensive proposition to say the least. If, however, students have no access to a library or comprehensive record store, listening to the examples might prove impossible.

Next, one must decide what other information students need to know about the course and find the best strategy for linking the necessary web pages efficiently. For my class I have four separate class pages, each containing different types of information. Students log on to a title page for the class; this page presents the title of the course, the instructor’s name and e-mail address, a brief synopsis of the course, and other links of interest where one can access additional information about the School of Music and the University. From this page, they can go to pages containing the class syllabus, directions for taking the class online, or the class schedule. As Ex. 1 shows, these pages are all linked so that students may access any of the others from any location on this part of the site, and all of these pages have a link back to the home page for the class.

Example 1. Layout of Class Information Pages

I created a logo and background for the course material that are different in appearance from those on the pages containing the online text, for reasons I’ll mention later. Finally, students may follow all the links to the course pages without restriction, but they can only access the online lessons through one password-protected link. As shown in Ex. 2, students go from the class schedule to a combination title page and table of contents. From there, they can access a preface and review the lessons in the online text without a password. To get to the lessons, however, they need a username and password.

Example 2. Page Layout of Online Text

I designed the instructional material as an online text for two reasons. First, I felt this was the easiest way to emulate a lecture or lesson format where each piece is discussed in detail. I also intended the class to be taken at the same time as the in-class version, so the online text would roughly follow the sequence of the regular class. Of course, the challenge here is to remember that the online lesson is virtually the only information students will receive about a particular topic. Therefore, one must try to anticipate any questions or trouble spots students might encounter. For this reason, I recommend this approach only with material very familiar to the instructor and which s/he has taught at least several times. Second, I chose to keep instructional material separate from the class information in case I wanted to publish the lessons in book form. My site structure, with its contrasting logos and page design, makes ownership easier to assert. It also makes citations easier: readers can cite the online text directly, along with the authors name and institution, which is more meaningful to the authors than a citation for an online class.

Students complete ten written assignments for the course. These were, for the most part, the same assignments that students in the regular class completed. On the class schedule page, I listed the suggested reading schedule and the assignment that students were to complete when each reading was finished. At the bottom of that page, I included a link to my own e-mail address. So, students read each assignment, open a mail document, and then switch back and forth between the two. When all answers were entered, they simply sent it to me. Interestingly enough, even though the assignments were virtually identical to the in-class assignments, I found myself taking far more time to grade the online student’s work. Since I could count on class time in which to explain trouble spots for the regular class, I felt compelled to give any such problems in the online assignments the same attention. The result, though, was a significantly longer time to grade each electronically-submitted assignment.

Probably the largest task is to write all files for the course. If one chooses a lesson format as I did, the time commitment necessary to write the lessons, decide on appropriate musical examples, create them in a notation program, make any necessary charts or diagrams, and so on, is considerable. This task can be expedited by using one of the HTML editors now widely available. When all HTML files are completed, they need to be uploaded to the server, all links need to be tested, and on some servers permission must be given by the owner before each file can execute. When setting up password-protected files, the necessary CGI files must be installed by the person managing the server, a task generally accompanied by many frantic e-mail communications between instructor and webmaster. Thus, one must allow time for such communications to make sure everything functions properly. In short, it is best to leave at least a full semester, preferably with a light teaching load, to plan, write, and implement a web-based course.

Once the course is completed, it needs to be added to the catalog in some way. This task seems relatively straightforward, but various pitfalls are present. For example, most universities already have established correspondence courses or courses taken from a distance. These courses are often administered by separate departments with their own publications, catalogues, fee structures, and so on. But with the growing popularity of Web-based courses, individual departments now want them as a part of their regular course offerings, not listed in some alternate catalogue from a different division. How, then, can students, particularly those who might reside in a different location and who might not be enrolled in the university, be informed about and register for these courses? I finished my own course just in time for the Fall 1997 semester and attempted to find an answer to this question. To my surprise, even though this type of course is a definite part of our long-range goals for the college, no one knew quite what to do with it! Some of this dilemma was poor timing, since regular courses are listed in the class schedule long in advance, but there was no mechanism in place to facilitate student registration for an online course intended as a part of the regular School of Music offerings. After doing some legwork and making many calls on campus, I found that students wishing to register for my class from a distance would need to do so as special students, a status requiring a separate registration form altogether. Another consideration is academic credit at the student’s university. If the prospective student is already enrolled in another music degree program, then that university must agree to accept the online class for degree credit.

After the registration problem was resolved, I only needed to find students to test the course online. I originally intended to enroll about 10-15 students as a trial run of the course, since any more than that would have created an overload on my already full schedule. I sent out some electronic inquiries to colleagues in the region and received two responses from interested students, one in Arizona and one in New Mexico. I thought the situation was ideal, but after communicating with them, both students finally decided that it was too much trouble to go through the process of registering for the class and trying to convince their own departments to accept the class for academic credit in their respective degree programs. As a result, I had three students test the course electronically, all on our my campus: two were undergraduate music majors with scheduling conflicts, and the third was a doctoral piano major who volunteered to review the course to help prepare for his upcoming preliminary exams.

At our university, as at many state schools, departmental funding is based upon enrollment in the university at large. Every term, we take a tally after a certain date to determine the size of our classes, which in turn determines the level of state funding. But if students take online courses from another university, who gets to "claim" those students as their own for purposes of funding allocations? For example, suppose a music student decides to take an online course in music theory from one school, another in music history from another, and then wants to receive academic credit at their own school. This vision is familiar to many, and is often a driving force behind the development of online courses. As I’ve already mentioned, the first hurdle is to determine if the host school will accept the online courses for credit. If that is accomplished, though, which of the three schools involved will claim that student for their enrollment? And if the student takes a total of six credits from other schools, will they still be considered full time students at their own institutions? Granted, these types of issues will be dealt with as more courses are offered online and as individual departments find ways to solve these types of problems. For now, though, they can pose a dilemma for departments attempting to offer courses online. At this time, the issue has yet to be resolved in my own state system.

Other issues concern the rights to professional output. In Arizona, for example, the Board of Regents technically holds the copyright for all instructional materials used in classes at the state universities. With an online class, then, does the instructor retain the rights for any of the enormous amount of material required for a class? When I posed this question to our university attorneys, I was told that they were not particularly interested in text or lecture notes that were placed on the Web for the purposes of a class. I was advised to place my copyright mark on the pages of instructional material. They were, however, much more interested if the proposed class incorporated a multimedia format, and online courses using these types of devices probably are more likely to attract the attention of administrators looking to retain the rights to online instructional materials. As you can imagine, this factor also influenced my decision to exclude sound files from my lessons.

A related issue is the ownership of the class as a whole. Administrators might not feel the need to address this issue, but research and scholarly output are vital to an instructor’s professional interests. For example, if I place a class on the web and then leave the university the following year, does the university retain the right to offer my class? Online classes, despite their appeal, do not run themselves, and the presence on a university server of an online class does not guarantee that another professor will find it appropriate. In this sense, then, it seems that online classes necessarily must follow the professor who created them, a situation directly at odds with the notion that a university retains the rights to instructional materials.

From my own perspective, developing and offering the online class was interesting and challenging. I believe the online students received a quality class, but the concept still needs some fine tuning. I found myself forgetting about the online students, since they did not attend class. Their assignments, sent to me via e-mail, sometimes got lost in the daily onslaught of electronic mail I usually receive. And, I had to design slightly different tests for the online students because of slight differences in course material. The class also includes a listserv to which all students are required to subscribe and contribute. I had hoped that the interaction and discussion on the listserv might give the online students a sense of membership in the class. In this particular group, however, students seemed hesitant to initiate electronic discussions, and so that part of my idea for the class never materialized.

Another issue with which instructors must grapple is fairness in grading criteria. As mentioned earlier, I altered the tests slightly to take into account slight differences in course material. But what happens if students do not take the online class seriously? A colleague of mine with an online class at another university mentioned this problem to me. One of his students simply did not keep up with the online class, but he was reluctant to grade her too harshly. In my own case, the grades of my online students were the same as their grades in the other academic class they both took that semester, so I felt as though they had probably expended the same amount of effort in each class. I did perceive that one of my students was not putting as much effort into the class as he needed to. This perception was confirmed by the low grade that he earned. Contrary to some statements one reads, a computerized presentation of material does not automatically guarantee that students will be interested and motivated. In fact, I fear this type of medium might prove detrimental to some students who need the type of extra "push" instructors can deliver in person.

In conclusion, Web-based online classes are promising, but they require additional research and refinement. Careful attention to appropriate presentation is necessary, and one must make a special effort to anticipate any questions or problems students might have. As I’ve discussed, many administrative issues still remain unsolved, most notably the methods for integrating the online classes into regular course offerings and the intellectual ownership of instructional materials. These types of classes will continue to grow in popularity as a means of reaching a certain type of student with specific types of classes, and they will soon become a permanent addition to our university curricula.

_________________________

1. Online text. URL - http://www.u.arizona.edu/ic/mus320/title_page.html

2. Clifford, Robert. "Self-Paced Music Instruction: A Web-Based Hierarchical Model." Paper presented at the College Music Society annual meeting, Cleveland OH, Nov. 1997

3. Clifford, Robert, and Peter Lothringer. Twentieth-Century Music: Lessons and Analyses.