In recent years the World Wide Web has become increasingly important as one facet of the college teaching and learning experience. The web was viewed initially as an enormous database with tremendous potential for increasing access to reference sources around the world. A series of technological developments soon opened the door to greater interactivity and set the stage for the development of online courses.
The music curriculum has hardly been immune from this trend and an increasing number of core courses are being offered "online." Most of the time, though, the interactive nature of the course is limited to communication (via email, bulletin boards, and chatrooms), with most of the course material consisting of traditional elements (reading assignments, musical examples) delivered in a nontraditional way.
While not dismissing the value of these efforts, it is necessary to look at more robust ways of harnessing web technology if online courses are to become more than administrative shells for class management. Music presents special challenges in this regard since so many of the activities necessary for teaching and learning require direct interaction with the music itself. To this point, satisfactory tools have not been developed for facilitating this interaction via the web, hampering the faster development of music courses for which this level of musical interaction is a necessary ingredient. While courses in music literature (including appreciation) have been offered with some success and interesting work has been done with basic skills courses like music fundamentals, courses requiring more intensive manipulation of musical materials have not been widely attempted.
This paper will focus on attempts to develop a two-year music theory sequence intended to be taught entirely via the web. Such a course, if developed successfully, has a number of exciting implications. First, it opens up the possibility for distance learning and the potential for broadening the student base. Second, it provides a set of tools that could equally be applied to the preparation of incoming freshman majors through online assessment and tutoring, thus enhancing their chances of succeeding after their arrival on campus. Finally, it can provide a web-based lab component for the traditional classroom theory course that will continue to be the training ground for most undergraduate music majors.
Potential Benefits
The development of a theory course based entirely on digital resources has a number of potential benefits. First, it can provide a clearer connection between explanation and example. In current theory textbooks a concept like the proper resolution of a German sixth chord is presented as a prose description followed by one or more examples from music literature demonstrating the application of the idea. In order to really grasp the explanation most students will have to go to a piano or listen to a recorded example on CD. In a digital version, the student can simply click on the example and hear it immediately. Moreover, additional graphics or animations can be used to underline the concept even more clearly. Finally, students can be given the immediate opportunity to resolve the chord in an on-screen exercise -- thus receiving feedback on their understanding of the concept.
A second benefit is a clearer connection between theory and practice. The use of digital audio as part of a web-based course makes it easy for students to hear pedagogical examples in the actual context of the literature from which they are drawn without having to shift their attention from textbook to anthology to recording.
Finally, there are several administrative benefits to a course taught in this manner. Instructors could wield even greater control over the sequencing of topics and examples, provide more personalized coaching, and set assignment and quiz difficulty parameters based on individual student performance.
Requirements
To provide these benefits, a music theory course in digital form must have the following characteristics:
Product Stages
As we move towards the development of such a course there will be several intervening stages. First, traditional music theory texts will provide a digital ancillary containing the music examples from the text. This ancillary might take the form of an integral CD-ROM or a publisher-based web site. Second, a completely digital text will be published either in CD-ROM or online format. A digital workbook may be provided as well, but at this stage student exercises will need to be manually evaluated. The third stage will feature machine-assisted evaluation of some or all student work. The final stage will be a completely digital course in which all content, assignments, feedback, and administration happen in the digital realm.
Challenges to overcome
To reach an advanced product stage, two significant barriers need to be surmounted. First, we must provide sufficiently dynamic interactivity. While having students read material onscreen and clicking examples to hear them offers some advantage over current text-based instruction it falls far short of the kind of dynamic learning that current technologies make possible. To translate the capability of those technologies to a browser-based interface will require both design and technical ingenuity.
A larger barrier is the need for reliable evaluation rubrics. Some kinds of exercises like chord construction and interval identification will be easily assessed online because the rules that govern those skills are simple. More complex tasks like part-writing will require a much more complex set of rules capable not only of recognizing right or wrong answers but of guiding students to improve their solutions through immediate feedback. This is less a technical challenge than an intellectual one.
Figure 1. An example of the interface from the prototype On-Line Music Theory course.
©2000 Icubed LLC
Prototype
We have begun working with a California company called I-Cubed to construct a prototype for a digital music theory course in order to have a test bed on which to explore some of these issues (Figure 1). Based on a relational database residing on a server that interacts with a local computer over the web via a Macromedia Director application, the architecture of this prototype allows for the kind of dynamic interaction needed while still providing the adaptive environment required.
Participants interested in the testing process may contact the author for more information.