Ebook: Music Learning with Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)

This book is the third in a sequence of books reflecting on the future of learning, and more specifically, how computers can give support to long-distance education. [1], [2]. This challenge has recently become the focal point of attention with the rise of MOOCs that finally implement the visions that advanced thinkers proposed already decades ago.

The book has three objectives.

1. First, it introduces the phenomenon of Massive Online Open Courses, known as MOOCs. They burst on the scene of long-distance computer-based learning half a decade ago with big promises of disrupting academic education. The book discusses topics like: What are MOOCs? What is their potential? What are their historical predecessors and their future prospects?

2. Second, it presents ongoing research into making MOOCs more effective and more adapted to the needs of teachers and learners. More specifically, the book focuses on a key critical issue: Given that there are tens and even hundreds of thousands of students following a particular MOOC, how can students be given the necessary feedback during the learning process and how can their competence be assessed?

3. Third, it presents the first steps towards ‘social MOOCs’. These are MOOCs that support the creation of relatively small learning communities in which interactions between learners goes beyond correcting each other's assignments. Social MOOCs try to mimic settings for humanistic learning such as a workshop, Jazz ensemble, a small choir, or a group participating in a Hackaton, in which students learn as apprentices, by solving problems, helping each other, and aided by somebody acting as tutor.

To make the discussion concrete, the book focuses on a particular domain of knowledge, namely music. Music is one of the most popular subjects (next to computing) of today's MOOCs. Many people want to learn about music, whether it is for playing an instrument, music theory, composition, song writing, or improvisation. Music requires many skills and those seriously engaged with music accept that it requires life-long learning, often taking place outside of the traditional educational system of musical academies and conservatories or private teaching.

Because of its popularity and the unique challenges that music poses to distance learning, the development of MOOCs for music has been one of the most fertile grounds for fundamental research and experimentation into MOOCs and results of experiments and the fundamental software advances that they require are already beginning to spill over into other domains of teaching through MOOCs.

What are social Moocs

Simplifying, we can say that there are two paradigms for learning and teaching: constructivist and instructional. The constructivist approach also known as ‘natural learning’ or ‘humanistic learning’ sees learners as active agents which autonomously explore their world by constructing rich models which they then try out while solving problems and making sense of the world. Learning within this paradigm ideally takes place within a (small) community of learners, for example, an atelier, a jazz ensemble, a fab lab, a hackathon. The teacher acts like a tutor that sets up scaffolded learning contexts and provides feedback to steer the discovery and exploration of models by the learner which are viewed as apprentices. Peers play a crucial role, both to motivate learners and to provide learning challenges and social feedback. Within the European tradition, the constructivist approach is associated with psychologists such as Vygotsky and Piaget and pedagogies worked out and put into practice by Steiner, Froebel, Montessori and, more recently, Malaguzzi. In the American tradition it is associated with Dewey and Bruner, liberal arts education, and the pedagogies of Papert or educational experiments such as Black Mountain College.

The instructional approach views knowledge as situation-response associations and learners as malleable acquirers of these associations through reinforcement learning. Reinforcement shapes associations in an inductive fashion through positive and negative examples and through reward and punishment administered by an external agent (possibly the environment). The instructional approach is associated in the US with psychologists such as Thorndike or Skinner and with pedagogies based on strict lesson plans with continuous assessment and clear reward and punishment. The instructional approach is also the foundation for connectionist inductive learning systems developed in AI.

The instructional approach has been shown to be very effective for the acquisition of basic skills and allows clear assessment and standardised education. It is therefore often imposed on teachers through central educational bureaucracies. But it is also known to lead to severe problems such as demotivation of both teachers and learners.

Both approaches have been used in computer-based education. For example, the programmed instruction method invented by Skinner can easily be turned into a computer-based instructional system, and some MOOCs, including many of the current MOOCs for music, follow this model rather closely. It was less obvious at first to use computers for supporting the pedagogy of open-ended constructivist learning, particularly in the context of distance education. However there have been some early significant developments showing the way. The best example is Seymour Papert's LOGO programming environment, in which learners discover mathematical concepts through programming the movements of a Turtle.

Based on this experience and the growing penetration of computers and smart phones in our daily lives, several papers in the present book argue that it is precisely through the use of computers, in particular through social media and computational means for assessment and tutoring, that a constructivist pedagogy can be put into practice on a much larger scale, leading to the promise of social MOOCs: MOOCs that try to foster a community of learners who share their work and help each other through feedback and cooperative problem solving.

Although traditional forms of classical music training, particularly the mastering of an instrument, often follow a Skinnerian instructional approach (piano teachers hitting their students on the hands is not uncommon), there is a consensus that greater enjoyment, motivation, and more powerful learning takes place within a constructivist peer setting, for example a string quartet or a small Jazz orchestra where players scaffold and motivate each other, progressively enhancing their skills. Social MOOCs try to recreate such learning conditions and thus make natural learning available to students who do not have access to the kind of peer and apprentice-style tutor interaction assumed by humanistic learning.

Structure of the book

The papers in this book all discuss steps towards social MOOCs: their foundational pedagogy, platforms to create learning communities, methods for assessment and social feedback, and concrete experiments. These papers can be read on their own, but they also strongly relate to each other and are presented in a logical progression, from background and pedagogical theory to concrete platforms and experiments. The papers are organized into five sections: I. Background, II. The role of feedback, III. Platforms for learning communities, IV. Experiences with social moocs, and V. Looking backwards and looking forward.

Part I. Background.

The first part of the book provides the basic background to later papers. It starts with a paper by LUC STEELS: The coming of (social) MOOCs. He introduces the notion of Massively Online Open Courses, sketches how MOOCs arose to deal with the ‘crisis in education’, how they rapidly spread thanks to the Internet, and what the current state of deployment is. The paper also introduces the concept of social MOOCs, why it is important to develop them, and which obstacles need to be overcome.

The second paper by JOHAN LOECKX entitled Learning music online, surveys the state of the art in on-line music learning. It provides background for the case studies reported later in the book and is intended as a guide for teachers and platform designers. Loeckx not only surveys and classifies the intense ongoing activity in online music learning but also examines critically some of the issues with available systems and argues for a better grounding of online music learning in pedagogy.

Part II. The role of feedback

Part II lays out the pedagogical foundations for social MOOCs, focusing particularly on the issue of feedback, not in terms of rewards and punishment but feedback as required to create stimulated open-ended learning environments that support constructivist learning.

The first paper by MARK D'INVERNO and ARTHUR STILLS entitled Social feedback as a creative process, sketches the historical roots of constructivist and instructional pedagogies within the Anglo-American tradition, and introduces the notion of social feedback as a key ingredient for social MOOCs.

The second paper by LUC STEELS, entitled Social Flow in Social MOOCs, pulls the concept of flow out of its traditional individualistic character to examine its potential role in the creation and sustainance of a motivated learning community within the setting of MOOCs.

Then there are two papers which give very personal accounts of learning trajectories for music. They both illustrate the importance of humanistic learning for the development of top musicians. The paper by RAY D'INVERNO, a renowned Jazz pianist, is entitled Teaching Jazz improvisation: a personal experience. It sketches his learning trajectory, recounting how the setting of a small Jazz ensemble which interacted regularly with experienced players, played a key role for him becoming a Jazz master and how he has tried to translate these insights into a teaching methodology recently used as the basis of a MOOC.

The paper by JOSEP-RAMON OLIVE, an upcoming opera singer. It is entitled Learning to be a singer and sketches his personal learning trajectory. He emphasizes again the importance of a humanistic education, where peer activity and guidance by a tutor create learning opportunities without a fixed curriculum or a rigid reinforcement framework.

Part III. Platforms for learning communities

Current MOOCs act mostly as content delivery platforms to be used by an individual learner with no direct social contact with others. The main interaction happens anonymously when learners are asked to correct some of the assignments of other students. Many MOOCs do feature some social media facilities (such as forums) and encourage physical encounters between other students in the same area. But the work on social MOOCs discussed in this book go much further, proposing and experimenting with platforms for the creation of learning communities where individuals are no longer anonymous but interact intensely with each other.

The first paper, entitled Music circle: Designing educational social machines for effective feedback, by MATTHEW YEE-KING, MARIA KRIVENSKI, HARRY BENTON, ANDREU GRIMALT-REYNES, and MARK D'INVERNO introduces a social MOOC platform for music learning that incorporates both the technologies for sharing music and mechanisms for supporting social feedback. The paper describes the participatory design methodology used to conceive this platform and reports the results of extensive evaluation studies with real users.

The second paper, entitled Giant Steps in Jazz Practice with the Social Virtual Band by MATHIEU RAMONA, FRANCOIS PACHET and STANISLAW GORLOW, describes another example of a social MOOC platform. It is geared to learn about Jazz improvisation, recreating the kind of interactions one sees in a small Jazz ensemble. The system not only integrates facilities to play along with standards, to store and share the results of these practice sessions, and to create or accept feedback with peers, but also tools for automatic machine-based feedback, for example for playing scales.

The third paper is entitled Steps towards intelligent MOOCs and contributed by KATRIEN BEULS and JOHAN LOECKX. It explores another aspect of humanistic learning, namely tutoring, using musical composition, specifically the writing of counterpoint, as a case study. The paper argues that the methods and technologies developed in intelligent tutoring systems can be integrated in MOOCs so that students get much more sophisticated feedback. The paper also reports on experiments to put flow theory at the service of scaffolding challenges for students.

The final paper of Part III is entitled Collaborative Peer Assessment using Peer-Learn by ISMEL BRITO, PATRICIA GUTIERREZ, KATINA HAZELDEN, DAVE DE JONGE, LISSETE LEMUS, NARDINE OSMAN, BRUNO ROSELL, CARLES SIERRA and CARME ROIG. It proposes a platform which has the creation and management of lesson plans devised and overseen by teachers as its core and then adds facilities for peer assessment. This platform is intended to support blended learning, in which distance education is integrated with traditional student-teacher interaction.

Part IV. Experiences with social MOOCs

This part of the book documents concrete efforts to use social MOOCs with ‘real’ users, both in the context of organized education (blended learning) and in the context of an open audience solicited through the web. The first paper entitled Using social media to revive a lost apprenticeship model in jazz education has been contributed by ED JONES, a renowned Jazz saxophonist, and HARRY BRENTON. They used the Music Circle Platform (introduced in Part III) to support a course on Jazz saxophone, studying in particular the role of tutor and peer feedback, whether a MOOC-like environment could help to revive the apprenticeship model traditionally used in Jazz education.

The second paper is entitled Improving music composition through peer feedback: experiment and preliminary results, contributed by DANIEL MARTIN, BENJAMIN FRANTZ and FRANCOIS PACHET. It reports on an experiment using the Virtual Social Band MOOC environment, raising two questions: (i) To what extent can peer feedback affect the quality of a music composition? and (ii) How does musical experience influence the quality of a feedback during the song composition process?

This part of the book ends with an intermezzo: a personal account by FIAMMETA GHEDINI on following a MOOC in the form of a comic strip entitled ‘So, I've been following a MOOOOC’. The MOOC was about song writing and offered by the Berklee College of Music (Boston).

Part V. Looking backward and looking forward.

The final part of the book puts MOOCs in a broader context. KEN KAHN, one of the early pioneers of the creative use of computers in education, discusses in his paper A half century perspective on the role of computers in learning and teaching the development of learning environments, and particularly open-ended constructivist learning environment such as LOGO Mindstorms devised by Seymour Papert.

GEORGE VAN DE PERRE, who is one of the early pioneers in distance-education and on-line learning, discusses in his paper Blended learning and MOOCs basic issues for the introduction of MOOCs within the context of traditional universities, and sketches the current movement towards blended learning that exploits the novel opportunities of MOOCs but integrated within the existing university framework.

CONCLUSIONS

The following key conclusions can be drawn from the papers in this volume: (i) MOOCs have arisen as a logical consequence of marrying long-distance education with the web and social media. They are here to stay and provide a valuable addition to the toolkit of learners and teachers alike. (ii) Most MOOCs today are based on instructional pedagogies and content delivery through the web, but there is the opportunity to build a new generation, which we call social MOOCs, that supports more powerful humanistic learning, which is much more adapted for many domains, such as Jazz improvisation. (iii) Assessment and feedback play a crucial role in all pedagogies and it is critical also in the development of social MOOCs. We need novel approaches, such as peer feedback, in which learners assess each others' achievements, automated assessment, in which algorithms take over some of the basic checks in a student's work, intelligent tutoring, which not only identifies errors but also suggests ways to repair them, etc. Several papers in this book show very concrete examples on how this can be done and report experiments testing whether these proposals work out in practice.

Due to the rapid advances of knowledge, globalization, budget cuts, and a bombardment of information, it is not easy for current generations to still find the opportunities, time, and focus for profound learning, even though this is more than ever necessary to survive in today's stressful economic climate. Technology is not a panacea for fixing the enormous challenges facing today's educators and learners, however we hope that the technologies developed here can lead to more effective and more humane learning opportunities for a larger group of students.

Acknowledgement

This book and most of the research reported here came out of the European FP7 project PRAISE (EU FP7 number 388770), funded by the European Commission under program FP7-ICT-2011-8. The seeds for many of the papers published here are the outcome of a workshop organized by Luc Steels with the assistance of Emìlia Garcia Casademont in Casteldefells (Spain) on 10-12 December 2012. I am indebted to Jorge Piz Dico (UPF, Barcelona) for proofreading most articles and helping out with Latex type setting issues, and Maria Ferrer Bonet (UPF, Barcelona) for editorial help and the handling of administrative matters. I also thank the people at IOS Press, particularly Carry Koolbergen and Paul Weij, for their efficient handling of this publication.

Luc Steels

ICREA, Institut de Biologia Evolutiva (UPF-CSIC) Barcelona

A MOOC is a Massively Online Open Course. It is massive because there are many students (sometimes hundreds of thousands). It is online because it uses the Internet for course delivery. It is open because it is publically available to anyone without selection barriers or payment. And it is a course, teaching a particular subject, often in engineering and science, but increasingly in all domains of human knowledge including the arts. MOOCs burst on the scene of online distance learning in the fall of 2011 and caused a wave of excitement followed rather quickly by a wave of scepticism and resistance. What are MOOCs? Will they help to deal with the ‘crisis in education’? How do they fit within the earlier developments in distance-education and the use of computers and telecommunication for supporting learning processes? What are the limitations of MOOCs? How can we strengthen them and fully profit from their potential? This paper addresses these questions from my personal viewpoint as an educator involved for decades in teaching and online distance-education. It looks at MOOCs, bringing in a European perspective, and suggests avenues for further research and practice.

Much of music learning happens outside the classroom in an informal setting, for example online by watching YouTube movies. Despite the many research effort and government projects, many online lack pedagogical foundations while few music educators fully employ online technology yet. In this paper, existing research on online music learning is reviewed as well as platforms and sites that are currently available, mapped in a so-called “market quadrant”. Also, the main problems with the current state-of-the-art are identified, along promising technologies that are believed to address these challenges.

Arguably one of the most important activities of a university is to provide environments where students develop the wide variety of social and intellectual skills necessary for giving and receiving feedback. We are not talking here about the kinds of activity typically associated with the term “feedback” — such as that which occurs through individual course evaluation questionnaires or more universal systems such as the National Student Survey, but the profoundly creative and human act of giving and receiving feedback in order to validate, challenge and inspire. So as to emphasise we are talking about this kind of feedback, we coin the term “creative feedback” to distinguish it from the pre-conceived rather dreary compliance-inflected notions of feedback and set out in this paper to characterise its qualities. In order to ground and motivate our definition and use of “creative feedback” we take a historical look at the two concepts of creativity/creative and feedback. Our intention is to use this rich history to motivate both the choice of these two words, and the reason to bring them together. In doing so we wish to emphasise the characteristics of an educational philosophy underpinned by social interaction. By describing those qualities necessary to characterise creative feedback this paper sets out an educational philosophy for how schools, communities and universities could develop their learning environments. What we present here serves not only as a manifesto for designing learning environments generally, but as a driver for designing technologies to support online social learning, as captured in the concept of social Moocs [70]. Technology not only provides us with new opportunities to support such learning but also to investigate and evidence the way in which we learn and the most effective learning environments.

Flow theory is a way to explain how humans can be self-motivated and reach a state of high focus and intense, very effective learning. Usually this theory is merely descriptive but recently it has also been operationalized and used as the basis for building autonomous agents. This paper examines how such an operationalization can be incorporated in computer-supported learning environments such as MOOCs. It also expands the notion of flow to take into account ‘social flow’ occurring in a group of learners, such as a sports team or a small Jazz ensemble. We discuss how this kind of social flow can be induced, what the benefits are, and how it is relevant for building learning communities through web and social media.

This short note gives a personal account of how I became an establish Jazz pianist. It emphasizes the importance of personal study and playing in a small group from the very beginning. I also describe various routes to improvisation, which I used as the basis for a MOOC on piano Jazz improvisation, currently in an experimental stage of development.

What are the key challenges in becoming a professional singer of classical music? This chapter is written from the perspective of a professional singer who has been taught using the traditional highly personalised ‘humanistic’ approach to music education, which starts in childhood with choirs, and then focuses on advanced voice technique, development of musical memory, as well as the acquisition and application of linguistic and historical concepts in approaching a score. It raises the question is in how far on-line learning courses can be helpful to augment this kind of training and in how far ideas from a humanistic approach can be transported into the domain of on-line music learning.

We report on our development of an educational social machine based on the concept that feedback in communities is an effective means to support the development of communities of learning and practice. Key challenges faced by this work are how best to support educational and social interactions, how to deliver personalised tuition, and how to enable effective feedback, all in a way which is potentially scalable to thousands of users. A case study is described involving one to one and group music lessons in an on-campus, face to face, higher education context that were observed and analysed in terms of the actions carried out by the participants. The actions are described and it is shown how they can be formalised into a flowchart which represents the social interactions and activities within a lesson. Through this analysis, specific scenarios emerged where the feedback being given might not be effective, e.g the recipient not understanding the feedback or the provision of feedback which is not specific enough. In answer to these scenarios of ineffective feedback, the requirements for a technological intervention which aims to make the feedback more effective are proposed. With this in mind, we are then able to describe a novel technological platform which has been developed as part of a large-scale European research project and which aims to support effective feedback. The platform is based around focused discussion of time based media, embedded within existing teaching activities at a research led higher education institution in the UK. We outline how it is being used in a blended learning model to support the teaching and learning of music. We reflect on the experience of developing techniques and systems for enabling communities of e-learning and describe our evaluation methodology which involves several case studies and approximately 400 users in its current phase.

This chapter deals with the issue of learning how to improvize. Traditional MOOCs provide jazz students with comprehensive theoretical and motivate students to practice intensively on their own. However, without a view of one's progress, and without feedback, individual practice is a long and winding road along which many students get lost. Indeed, most jazz learning systems lack these two crucial ingredients, resulting in high drop-out rates. This chapter addresses the issue of designing tools for supporting improvisation practice by bringing in a social dimension enabling peer-to-peer feedback, as well as a cloud-based infrastructure enabling arbitrary vizualisations of the evolution of the student performance. We introduce Social Virtual Band, a system that lets learners improvize solos on dynamically created accompaniments, and that records and archives all the training sessions along with the provided accompaniments on the cloud. Simple automatic feedback is presented to measure the evolution of his skills, based on a comparison between played note with scales obtained from automatic harmonic analysis. We describe the overall infrastructure underlying such a tool and discuss how such infrastructure opens up new possibilities for learning music.

Despite their overwhelming success, present-day Massive Open Online Courses are far removed from the student modelling capacities displayed by earlier Intelligent Tutoring Systems. Being mere content delivery tools, MOOCs typically lack a thorough assessment module as well as tools for personalising the learner's track. When learning music, particularly, these two properties are indispensable. This chapter surveys suggestions made by experts in the field of AI in education today towards the incorporation of ITS tools and techniques into MOOCs. Yet, more traditional student models and tutoring modules are not without shortcomings themselves and the real challenge lies in making active models of both the tutor and the student, which can be used to predict future learning tracks and set the right challenges. Agent-based tutoring systems offer an attractive framework for building such active tutor/student models. The proposed concepts are illustrated in the domain of music composition. A tutoring system has been implemented to teach students the craft of counterpoint, a commonly used strategy for learning polyphonic music composition. It is based on the theory of flow to keep students motivated and optimize learning.

In this chapter we introduce the PeerLearn methodology and its associated tools. We base the design of pedagogical workflows for students on the definition of rubrics (using PeerAssess) as the starting element that drives the creation of lesson plans (using LessonEditor). These plans run over our web platform (Peer-Flow). Students can evaluate one another following given rubrics and teachers can accept (or not) marks produced by a collaborative assessment tool (COMAS). Experimental results show that PeerLearn provide students with a highly satisfying new pedagogical experience and increased learning outcomes.

The MusicCircle software was integrated into the BA Jazz course at Leeds College Of Music in a module titled Jazz Saxophone Performance in Context. In this chapter Ed Jones, a professional Jazz saxophonist and music educator, describes his experience using MusicCircle. Until recently, Jazz players were educated according to an apprenticeship model where young musicians ‘paid their dues’ by playing alongside older, established musicians. A huge amount of valuable knowledge was passed on in these environments. Jones used MusicCircle as a vehicle for reviving and rebooting this apprenticeship model by creating a blended learning environment where performance, theoretical and technical issues could be explored within a jam session / rehearsal environment. He found that MusicCircle increased student engagement and helped performers learn how to give and receive effective feedback.

To which extent peer feedback can affect the quality of a music composition? How does musical experience influence the quality of a feedback during the song composition process? To answer these questions we designed and conducted an experiment in which participants compose short songs using an online lead sheet editor, are given the possibility to feedback on other participant's songs and can either accept or reject feedback on their compositions. This experiment aims at collecting quantitative data relating the intrinsic quality of songs (estimated by peer evaluation) with the nature of feedback. Preliminary results show that peer feedback can indeed improve both the quality of a song composition and the composer' satisfaction about it. Also, composers tend to prefer compositions from other musicians with similar musical experience level.

For more than fifty years people have been exploring how computers might enhance learning and teaching. The malleable nature of computers has enabled suggestions that a computer can act like flash cards, personal tutors, textbooks, reference books, virtual laboratories, quizzes, virtual spaces, lecture halls, and study groups. Perhaps the most radical suggestion has been to see the computer as something learners can creatively mold into something personally meaningful that is dynamic, interactive, and shared. And that the process of constructing such computational artefacts is rich in learning opportunities. These range from a deeper understanding of the subject matter of the constructions to high-level skills in thinking and problem solving.

The digital transformation of the world is likely to cause dramatic shifts in the world of learning, as is shown spectacularly by the MOOCs phenomenon [5]. It faces universities with the opportunity (and the obligation) to transform themselves thoroughly into institutions with a significantly improved and extended service to society and the ability to adapt flexibly to the rapidly changing needs (learning organizations). The Internet and the multimedia-interactive information technology allow to extend education beyond the (school) hours as well as beyond the (class) walls. The consequences of this simple observation are not yet fully seen. It is not just that universities' own regular full-time students get new “blended” learning schemes offered, but it also means new tools for flexible, part-time and distance learning, and it especially implies that external target groups can be served significantly better, such as future students (study orientation), graduates and professionals (lifelong learning), and last but not least international (global) audiences (virtual mobility).

A case study initiated in 2014 by the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Sciences and Arts and lead by two prominent thinkers from abroad concentrated on the question how traditional universities should deal with blended learning and MOOCs. The key conclusion is: “The optimal exploitation of ICT and the Internet for the new higher education of the 21st century” will not take place spontaneously. A ‘bottom up’ approach, i.e. the support of a multitude of individual initiatives, is necessary to let creative ideas grow, but insufficient to bring about the necessary changes in higher education. This requires powerful and radical ‘top down’ measures, and some concrete recommendations are given in this respect. In addition there is a continuing need for further fundamental research and visionary thinking.