Hello Readers!
When I created Music Toolbox, I was passionate about new and emerging eLearning tools, especially those related to the teaching of music. Over time, my interest shifted to eLearning generally and to topics specifically related to eLearning and instructional design. These changes reflected a shift in my professional life towards the support of faculty/course development in a wider variety of subjects. Additionally, with my year of liturgical music study in Taiwan (http://www.dharmaliturgy.net/), my year of migrating my truly massive Rutgers course – Music 133 between LMS, and my year of developing and launching a new online program at UC Irvine, there has been no time for Music Toolbox.
After 3 long years, I hope that this is changing; however, Music Toolbox will not be quite the same site. As I’ve worked as an instructional designer, I heard a lot of “common sense” talk about what works in the face-2-face and online classrooms; however, I’ve seen very little actual data supporting these techniques. In the next few months, I will be writing posts about what the data I’ve gathered from my own Music 133 class can tell me about the populations of students taking the course, and what techniques might increase satisfaction. In other words, I will be acting the roles of amateur statistician and researcher. I will make hypotheses, test them, and try not to misapply statistical concepts! I would also like to write about some of the definitive lessons I’ve learned from launching a new nursing doctoral program. Lastly, through-out my posts would like to muse about how the innovations of the “cognitive revolution“ (exemplars Kahneman, Tversky & others) can/should, or can’t/shouldn’t, be applied to instructional design and curriculum development. OK… an probably a few cool tool videos.
First, however, I must put to bed on a topic that several instructional designers have asked, “how can I create an accessible music fundamentals course?” Unfortunately, there are no simple answers, but there are some terribly interesting questions!
Watch for that post soon!
Stephen Wilcox
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