Before COVID-19 online music classes were not encouraged by the parents, students & even by teachers. This is because they didn't believe that it is practically possible to learn a musical instrument effectively from online music classes. Though online music learning platforms were used by few students for advanced learning like master classes or to learn from highly talented music teachers who are far away from their location. But now the scenario has been completely changed.
Post Pandemic World!
The current pandemic has shaken up the world. The old way of living has gone out the window, making way for new measures and ways to cope with the situation.
What's more striking is that COVID-19 has brought about a new trend in the education sector. Most of the schools and colleges went online. And so the music education is now online, where most of the music students are now getting adapted to learn music online.
Impossible became possible !
Before the pandemic situation even most teachers never believed that online music education is possible for beginners and intermediate students. When no other options were left they have started to explore all the possibilities to give the best learning experience for students. For most of the teachers it was a trial & error including Akira Music Academy because this was totally a new platform. But quite a few months ago they figured out how to do it.
Is Online music learning worth it ?
Still today many don't believe in these online music classes, when we speak to the students and parents they say that they will wait till everything gets normal, But that situation doesn't seem to be near. But still most of them think this spoil the students's interest and degrade their musicality. I will give an example of my student , who was learning classical guitar in Chennai, he was a very bright student and a quick learner who finished his grade 3 within five months of learning. Then the lockdown came and they refused to take online music classes. After one year, when things looked bit better he came to me, I was shocked that he totally started practicing wrong methods and he was really struggling to play easy phrases, he forgot all his finger rules and struggling was to play simple glissando and slurs also his sight reading became very poor. It really took me two more months to correct all his mistakes of self learning. But again when the COVID second wave struck India, again lockdown was imposed. Now his parents are still not interested in online guitar lessons.
How effective is online music education?
There are a lot of difficulties in online music classes. For students who are keen it works and for others it doesn't work. When students are not interested in learning music (where there can be many external reasons for that), It becomes very difficult for the teachers as the students turn off their videos and keep giving excuses with the technical errors.
Difficulties in teaching music online.
There are few difficulties like technical issues ! Apart from that the teaching difficulties are :
1.“Visibility” of the instrument.
2. The latency in the video or audio to judge whether they are using right fingers.
The solution for this is homework.
Whatever the students observe from the teacher in the class he/she should practice at home and send the homework as a video focusing on the full instrument, which helps us to correct other details in playing and this also helps the parents to understand the training and the learning phase of the students.
Other difficulties are tuning the instrument, String Instruments like Guitar , Violin & ukulele needed to be tuned once a while, but for the very beginners this is very difficult in understanding the tuning. This can be overcome when the parents sit for a couple of classes to learn how to tune the instruments and help their children later.
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