Berkleemusic — Berklee’s Online Extension
Learning Pro Tools in Online Time
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The future of education as we know it |
The nature of the great American pursuit of Pursuits, regardless of the ebb and flow of business brains, was permanently altered with the maturation of the Internet. "Working remotely" (AKA, at home) now shares space with terms of workplace endearment that include "medical benefits," "401K," and "discounted yoga classes." Naturally, the effect has also begun to make its way into the institutional fabric of higher learning.
Enter Berkleemusic (www.berkleemusic.com). For those of us who have bought into the World Wide Webernet but either indulge in a busy life or/and don’t live in or around Boston, Berkleemusic offers a sizable taste of the tried-and-true goodness that is the Berklee College of Music via an expressly online, interactive environment.
Even a quick meandering through the Berkleemusic site divulges the careful planning and the breadth of services that are already proving to comprise a successful approach. "It's a very serious online school dedicated to musicians — faculty-led courses, lots of feedback, lots of interaction with the students and faculty," explains Berkleemusic's Associate Vice President, Dave Kusek. "It's a very serious endeavor, not just some trivial website."
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Dave Kusek |
Two types of classes are available at Berkleemusic: Instructor-led Online Courses that include production, writing, business, and education concentrations; and Video Master Classes that tap into a "When Music Works" series of DVDs and online streams to provide instruction in performance and music business. Both sets of coursework are offered on an on-going basis — next up, June 16 and July 7 of this year — and generally have about a 10-12 week duration.
The Pro Tools 101 course that recently launched at Berkleemusic is one such class. Having earlier built a class around David Franz's Producing in the Home Studio with Pro Tools (published by Berklee Press), Berklee's shared combination of a solid business and educational relationship with Digi naturally led to the development of the online Pro Tools 101 curriculum.
Kusek expounds, "We created a suite of courses that we've now rolled into one course: "Producing in the Home Studio Using Pro Tools." It's a 12-week course, and it's really about, 'What does it mean to be a producer? How do you get the band together and get the most out of the performers? How do you record? How do you mix? What is the role of the producer in a project?' — all centered around Pro Tools. It's really production curriculum as opposed to what the product does per say. [The class] is very popular, very successful."
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Producing in the Home Studio with Pro Tools, 2nd Edition |
And so Berkleemusic's Pro Tools 101 course was born, intended to provide a very convenient entry level-to-intermediate technical complement to the production-centric direction already established with the "Producing..." curriculum.
"There's a tremendous advantage here that we hear again and again from our online students," Kusek describes, "that one of the best things about taking an online course at Berkleemusic is that you can do it whenever you want. Within the course of a given week, you don't have to show up at a classroom at any specific time. You can be working all day and do the class at night. If you miss one night, you can do it the next. That's a huge advantage for people who have a real life.
Along with a quick, straightforward registration process, "the online version of Pro Tools 101 has the same requirements as the classroom version of Pro Tools 101. We use the same measures; the student guide is shipped to the student as a textbook. We've added a lot of interaction and examples and assignments and group projects to the text.
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Barry Kelly |
"Most of the courses are very media rich," reiterates Marketing Manager Barry Kelly. "We use text in order to introduce and explain a concept, and visual Flash demonstrations to reinforce or to describe an example. So there're a lot of different elements in terms of teaching as well as the collaborative component."
Additional interactivity is available via discussion boards, email, assignment downloads and uploads, file sharing, and 24/7 online chat (with organized chats scheduled regularly at least once a week). With an average 15-20 students per course and a virtually limitless pool of knowledge readily accessible, the advantages are obvious.
"We have an eight-semester calendar so basically every seven to eight weeks we start another course," Kusek discloses. "We get a reasonably sized class together so students can start together and work together on projects and work through the material together with the faculty members rather than you being by yourself with your computer trying to figure everything out.
"It's very much a participatory experience, a community of students and a faculty member — that's a lot of the value of the online courses at Berkleemusic. You're not just sitting in front of a screen and having the computer grade what you do. That's not it at all. You're really sitting in front of a screen connected to a network of other Pro Tools users who're going to guide you through the material, answer your questions, challenge you. That's really what it's all about."
"We have people all over the world taking the course right now," Kusek continues, "from those who are brand new to it — in some cases the course is starting and their gear is showing up the same day — to people who have complete full-blown TDM systems taking the production course." (Berkleemusic's Pro Tools 101 course requires access to a Pro Tools LE system and is largely geared toward Pro Tools LE).
Finally, Berkleemusic's program includes a career center with a series of searchable databases and community spaces specifically intended to promote students' talents and projects. "Students can promote themselves to the network by creating a multimedia web page with tools that we have on the site where they can put up example tracks they've produced, example movies they've produced, the life story of their band, their album art, tour calendars, and reviews of the band.
"It's one of the things people do before, during, and after taking the course. There's also a series of discussion forums, and quite a few more in production, where anybody can post any kind of question they want and can ask each other, 'Have you had problems with this?' or 'What's the solution to that?' It's a very active network."
For the full Berkleemusic scoop and to keep an eye on their ever-increasing online curriculum offerings, visit www.berkleemusic.com. Remember, new courses begin June 16 and July 7.
* See http://training.digidesign.com for the significance of all facility, course work, certification, etc. designations.
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