Online Music Lessons

Online Music Lessons

You see a lot on the Internet these days about online lessons. Mostly people are talking about the switch to online studies that most schools have made and there have been quite a number of critical opinions about this voiced.

Certainly the challenges of delivering quality online lessons to a class are a bit formidable.  Even one on one video tutoring can be problematic, if there has not been enough preparation for use of this medium and, certainly, events have demanded that many make an immediate jump.

Online music lessons, on the other hand, have been around for a long time and many have made a good study of the most effective ways to deliver online music lessons.

Indeed, with the technology available and the correct preparation of teaching materials, online music lessons can be every bit as effective as music lessons in person.

One of the challenges of it is not just demonstrating the technique of the instrument but the theory end of it; reading notes or chords and such things. Teaching the rudiments is especially a problem and it is not well solved by simply holding a book up to the screen and pointing, saying ‘see this thing here? That’s a half note!’

This is where good screen sharing technology comes in and several ‘video meeting’ platforms have great screen sharing capabilities.

The video in this post is a very short example of screen sharing on the Zoom.us platform. In it, I’m sharing a previously made video about violin technique. You can see me as I’m sharing it in the upper right corner.

One can also share anything that can be displayed on the computer desktop such as EBooks and materials that are prepared as PDFs or Word Docs as well as pictures, of course.

One can switch back and forth between the screen sharing and the live screen where the teacher can watch the student play or play and demonstrate for the student on the instrument.

A good teacher will have lots of material prepared to screen share and then he can even send the material directly to the student. This is digitalized material that can be shared and sent quickly and it supports and elaborates on any regular printed lesson books that might be used.

These lessons can also be recorded obviously and made available for the student to review on his own later, if he desires and this is an added bonus that you don’t even get from in person lessons.

If you’d like to find out more about online music lessons, go to my Facebook page;
Brian’s Music Lessons.