Week 3

I think that some of the most common interactions are those that are most adaptable and efficient for the participants. The asynchronous forms of communication, such as email and various other means of text-based discussion online allow for all forms of interaction to occur. Within an online class setting, the vast majority of the interaction occurs between the learner and the content. Here the content is for the most part static subject matter that is presented online or in other readings.

I would say that the larger percentage of the interaction in my course would be learner-content based. I will present video tutorials accompanied with images and text that will guide the student through each task. I would also like to have a discussion board in place for each section of the course where students could post issues that they are experiencing or concerns that they may have pertaining to the current task. Being that I am requiring students in my course to use new technology to engineer their assignments, I am not expecting them to have prior knowledge in this respect. For this reason I need to have an expansive learner-learner component in place that allows students to learn from one another’s experiences from a similar perspective. I would like to have the ability to address the issues and concerns of my students and provide additional resources, whether they are additional video tutorials, screenshots with text or audio samples. It would be a lot of work initially, but once in place I could archive these resources and refer to them in future classes. I also hope to incorporate activities that warrant different types of interactions and layer them in a manner that they all support one another seamlessly. This will be an especially challenging task in the course because of the technical nature of the content and the span of experience levels that I expect to encounter.

The leading objective for my course is to familiarize students with the progression of composing and mixing a complete song from start to finish using only a computer and a few peripherals. My goal is to get them comfortable in working within the virtual music studio environment, utilizing its devices and the overall process of sequencing musical notation. I am expecting that my students will, at the bare minimum, have a decent understanding of basic music composition and be familiar with common vocabulary as well as a song’s structure. Here again, I am presuming that the largest challenge will lye in teaching the technical intricacies of the software rather than the fundamentals of music composition.


I will incorporate several video presentations into my course that will serve as guides for many of the steps in creating and routing devices within the audio software application and give students an overview of what their weekly tasks are. These presentations fall under the “Absorb” classification because the students will only need to watch and listen to them. I plan to embed a video at the beginning of a few modules in order to introduce what will be covered. Provided next will be supporting images and text describing the task in further detail followed by another video that will illustrate the actual procedures. I will only use video as a necessary tool to demonstrate complex tasks that would otherwise require a lot of elaborate text. I plan to have a PDF equivalent of each video to meet compliance standards. The purpose of these presentations will be to provide clear instruction and a resource that students can reference when they come to the “Do” activities.

After the task is explained and demonstrated the student will be prompted to participate in a “ponder activity” where they can decide what approach they’ll take for their next task. There may even be a few “stop and think” questions to encourage brainstorming. Next will be a practice activity that’ll require the student to transform the information that they’ve just obtained into knowledge or skills. This is classified as a “Do” activity. Within these activities I will ask that the students set up a recording session using the previous video as a step-by-step guide. There will be guidelines in place as far as the instruments or framework of the composition, but these activities will give the students a large amount creative freedom. They are intended to help the student gain confidence and inspire them forward toward their next task. An example of such an activity would be for the student to create a drum pattern using any percussion instruments and tempo that they want.

The next task will have more restrictions because it will be part of a cumulative project. It will require that the student develop an original musical sequence based on several criteria. This task is called original work and is classified as a “Connect” activity because it is essentially asking that the student connect what they’re learning with what they know. Here they will perform a genuine work and submit it for critique. An example would be to create an original bass line at a 92 BPM tempo that compliments the kick drum pattern in the previous weeks drum pattern. They are creating a musical pattern using tools that they are learning and applying them to they know about music (tempo, scale, instruments etc.) The assignment will be uploaded and critiqued by fellow students similar to how blog posts are commented upon in this class. The final “Connect” activity will be a group project where each member must develop an original phrase or melody that ultimately compliments one another within the composition as a whole.

I have briefly and ambiguously described the core content of my proposed course. I’ve listed resources that I feel will enhance the overall learning experience of the participants, but at the same time realize that scripting, recording, editing and posting video introductions and tutorials for each module and providing ADA compliant alternatives is probably being a little overly ambitious on my part (especially being that I entered this class two weeks behind schedule). I will do my best to create the course how I envision it and incorporate audio, graphical and video tools that reinforce the learning goals that I hold for my students.