Teaching Music Online

By Georg Hübner

This instructional book is excellent for teachers of brass music as well as fans of Norwegian black metal, Swedish boy groups or Finnish polka. From tech-savvy musicians with their own recording studios to classical piano teachers, who prefer pencil and paper, "Teaching Music Online" can help anyone take their musical expertise and hand it down to students online.

Technical setup requirements will be discussed, as well as the acoustic and visual differences to traditional face-to-face, real life lessons. Separate chapters are also devoted to the particularities of organization and communication. Practical tips and tools complete the guide.

This booklet is a guide for online private lessons. It is not as a score to be followed note by note but, rather, a lead sheet over which you should lay your own interpretation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jul 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781098325152

Book preview

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1. What is Online-Teaching?

What types of online teaching are discussed here?

Online teaching means that lessons are taught exclusively through online media, media that are available via the Internet.

Specifically, these can be video meetings like Zoom, Jitsi, Skype, Microsoft Teams or others: Meetings involving a host in two-way communication with other participants; also webinars where a speaker gives a presentation as pure lecture. E-mails, messenger services or video tutorials on YouTube, for example, are also included. The decisive difference is that the teacher and the student are not in the same room. Simultaneity is not necessarily a requirement.

This raises the following question: synchronous vs. asynchronous teaching – which is better? To explain: both are aspects of online teaching. Synchronous learning is learning that happens at the same time for the instructor and the students, meaning that there’s real-time interaction between them. It can happen on or offline. Synchronous teaching takes place when there is simultaneity. In other words: when teacher and students sit in front of the screen at the same time and talk via video chat, for example. Asynchronous learning is learning that doesn’t necessarily happen at the same time for the instructor and the students. There’s no real-time interaction; the content is created and made available for consumption later on. Asynchronous means: no simultaneity. Pre-produced videos, or mails with pre-produced content, are made available to the student and are retrieved on demand. The discussion is: what is generally the better method, what is more appropriate, and in which situation.

We believe that this discussion has missed the mark. Both are viable teaching methods and depending on the requirements, both should be used. The ideal is a mix of all available options, a tailor-made solution to meet the needs of each respective student. We should use all of the tools at our disposal to create the best teaching experience possible. Therefore, synchronous and asynchronous should not be mutually exclusive. On the contrary: they complement each