Music students at the University of Chichester Conservatoire completed questionnaires about their experience of the forced use of remote teaching and learning due to Lockdown, as imposed in the United Kingdom from March to June 2020, and how this impacted their self-beliefs, decision making processes, and methods of preparation for their performance assessments. Students had the choice to either have musical performance assessed in line with originally published deadlines (still in Lockdown) via self-recorded video or defer the assessment until the following academic year. Student’s choice to defer or submit the assessment during Lockdown was influenced by a range of forced factors, such as adaptions required by online teaching, limitations of rehearsal in their home environment, and the challenges in facilitating and recording their own assessments. Students completed online questionnaires about their self-efficacy, resilience, wellbeing, and provided free text responses explaining the reasoning for their decision to record their performance or to defer the assessment were coded to reveal patterns impacting their decision and preparation processes. Those choosing to submit their assessments demonstrated more strategies in their preparation and reported higher perceived self-efficacy scores. The specific conditions for this assessment, as a result of Lockdown, revealed correlations between resilience and both self-efficacy and wellbeing. The impact on teaching and the student experience is discussed and suggestions to support students in future settings of blended delivery are presented. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

This article details online education design at an Australian university undergraduate music program. The author reviews the rapid development of online learning activities relating to music performance in response to the COVID-19 pandemic enforced lockdown. The lockdown imposed serious challenges for music educators, the overarching one being how to engage students via a screen rather than in a rehearsal room. As the unit designer/assessor, the author utilized specific cloud-based audio software networking tools that are accessible to students (Audiomovers, Splice Studio) to devise learning activities that encouraged creative interactive learning. The author details the advantages and disadvantages of each learning activity. As a substitute for face-to-face interaction, online learning has substantial limitations in relation to music education. Student engagement with accessible online audio tools can enhance skills and knowledge development and interactive learning, thus maximizing student satisfaction and collaborative learning outcomes.

Adults use technology as a tool to learn, and the Internet is an important platform for knowledge acquisition. Music students and teachers use interactive websites, online apps, and/or computer programs for learning, feedback, and creative engagement during formal lessons. Anecdotally, more piano teaching is occurring online, but future educators have rarely experienced online lessons. Videoconferencing and online platforms bring music instruction to remote and underrepresented populations, and online instruction can be as effective as face-to-face lessons. Existing technology allows digital or MIDI-enabled acoustic pianos to connect synchronously over the Internet, producing reliable instrumental audio, separate from the video-conferencing platform. Research is needed on how to help teachers transition to the online format, make teaching modifications, and codify best practices in synchronous online piano teaching. Currently, tertiary piano pedagogy and music technology training rarely include online teaching, even though musicians will need to teach online upon graduation. This case study explored a pedagogy student's experience of taking synchronous online piano lessons and identified pedagogical skills needed to transition to online teaching. Online lessons occurred during a ten-week period using the Internet MIDI software program. Data were gathered and triangulated through student and instructor post-lesson journal reflections, in-depth interviews, and observation of lesson videos. The following themes emerged: pre-lesson apprehension about studying piano online, quickly dissipating technology concerns, typical lesson behaviors, and positive opportunities resulting from the technology. The pedagogical experience provided the student with a comprehensive set of strategies for effective online teaching that could prepare future teachers for teaching synchronous online piano lessons.

The teaching of improvisation at tertiary institutions has primarily been through face-to-face methods in jazz education contexts and music education more widely. Jazz is a music that is performed with others in shared spaces and is similarly learned in social contexts. It is because of these social learning dynamics that pedagogy often relies on social constructivism. The social constructivism and inter-corporeal nature of jazz education has led to specific challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, it has also allowed for experimentation with teaching practice and rethinking of how improvisation can be taught, particularly to novices. As Australian universities transitioned to fully online learning rapidly in March, questions quickly arose about how curriculum, learning activities, and assessment could be delivered in compliance with social distancing requirements. In this article, we discuss the transitioning of a beginner improvisation class of 21 students at a tertiary institution, primarily in their first or second year of university, to fully online delivery using a flexible research design that embraces a self-reflexive and peer dialogue approach to researching and redesigning the course. In reviewing previous research literature, we have identified the reliance on pedagogical approaches previously deemed questionable by many jazz educators and the affordances and limitations of utilizing technology to teach music online. We outline the adaptations to teaching improvisation for beginners, which use a more structured and evidence-based informed pedagogical approach in contrast to most tertiary jazz education. Subsequently, we conclude the article by offering a prospective model to advance the teaching of improvisation online to novices based on evidence-based learning and teaching strategies.

In musical instrument training, researchers have gradually started exploring the potential of interactive technologies supporting learning processes and teaching methods. Although numerous technological tools have been proposed to enhance instrument learning and teaching, these methods rarely find their way into daily practice and teaching routines. In this study, we report data from an online survey study administered to violin and drum kit teachers. Results reveal distinct learning profiles of novice violin and drum kit students and exhibit a variety of teaching approaches toward adults and children. Furthermore, they provide more insight into teachers’ opinions on the use of virtual reality (VR) and smart wearable technologies in early instrumental training, as well as their attitudes regarding technology design. Overall, our findings highlight the importance of involving teachers in the initial stages of technology design to facilitate technology acceptance and adoption, prevent potential mismatches between requirements regarding technological functionality and actual user needs, and promote musical growth and skill acquisition.

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in many schools temporarily moving to online learning. For some general music teachers, this involves prerecording lessons. This column discusses how general music teachers can create prerecorded lessons using Microsoft PowerPoint.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology can reshape music education to enable students to learn musical instruments and compose music in a fun and easy way. This article examines the effective-ness of AI-enabled music teaching. The study seeks to incorporate AI-powered chatbots into piano classes in seven music schools and evaluate their effect on student performance. The results show that students who used the given app achieved better results than those enrolled in conventional classes. Overall, exploiting AI resulted in a 15% increase in academic performance, but the intensity of training led to variation in achievements. With this app, the scores increased as follows: piano playing by 6.51%; solfeggio and music literature by 4%; and vocal signing by 0.56%. The integration of chatbots in music education opens new developmental prospects. Based on the present findings, AI can be successfully integrated into music education.

Music education is aimed at the development of musical abilities, emotionality during the performance of musical compositions, and all-round development. The aim of the article is to determine the possibilities of schoolchildren obtaining musical knowledge with the help of modernized online technologies, as well as to determine the importance of a teacher in modern music education. The indicators were determined by a questionnaire, the data collection for which was done using a Likert scale. Initially, the paper identified approaches to teaching students prior to the study. The results showed that more emphasis was placed on the use of book-based theoretical materials (46%), which allowed only 21% of students to achieve a high level of knowledge. The use of information technology was common among 9% of students, which allowed 76% of students to achieve high results, which is based on acquiring knowledge in a shorter time. The authors concluded that it is necessary to provide improved stages of learning, which will expand the use of modernized technology. Work on the theoretical basics of piano playing can be implemented with the Vivace app; Flow app helps one to work on sound features; Functional Ear Trainer app is about developing rhythm and hearing; and Chordana Play app helps one to work on a piece of music. After training, by calculating the coefficient of effectiveness, it was found that students in group #1 (0.791), who mastered the skills of playing the piano according to the developed training stages and without a teacher, showed the quality of acquired knowledge lower than students in group #2 (0.853), who were trained under the direct influence of a teacher. The data obtained confirm the high quality of learning in the groups, as the educational process was built with the correct distribution of workload and providing opportunities for the development of musical skills. It is established that the students of group 1 to a greater extent developed independence (29%), and group 2 was good at the accuracy of musical tasks’ sequence (28%). The practical significance of the work is based on the possibility of transforming the music learning system with the help of modern technology. Prospects for the study can be based on a comparison of the quality of teaching the piano and vocal training, excluding the participation of a teacher in the learning process.

The purposes of the research were to 1) explore the effectiveness of the blended learning approach of piano on the performance of the major students in the Music department of Hunan Vocational College of Art and 2) to determine the students' perceptions of the blended learning approach through a questionnaire survey. The participants of this study were 59 students majoring in piano, freshmen and sophomores who were studying with a face-to-face method and Violy application at the Music Department of Hunan Vocational College of Art. The quantitative research design of the quasi-experiment and questionnaire were conducted. The paired sample t-test was applied for hypothesis testing while the descriptive analysis—mean and standard deviation were used to report the samples' perceptions towards blended learning. The results revealed statistically significant differences between the scores of piano performance post-test after Violy had been employed and the pretest. The four piano performances measured-accuracy, technique, musicality, and repertoire difficulty had shown the improvement scores of the students once the Violy application was integrated as a teaching method. In addition, the students exposed to the Violy application expressed positive attitudes toward the usage of the Violy application. Therefore, the Violy application is a proven effective learning tool to improve student piano performance.

For performing arts education, Sage on the stage and Learn from the Masters were halted by the COVID-19 pandemic, and so did everything else. All lectures, tutorials and other face-to-face skill-based training sections were cancelled and were replaced by the online model. Such a model was only seen as one of the supplementary components for performing arts education in the past. From January 2020, this online pedagogy was inevitably placed to surmount the challenges caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The social distancing measures demanded the blended pedagogy into a new online approach, in which the traditional face-to-face teaching to be replaced by synchronous online learning (facilitated by technologies such as Zoom, Cisco Webex, Google Class, Panopto etc.). Meanwhile, to offer opportunities for cognitive participation which allows students to process the learning and be reflective, webinar and innovative performance projects were launched from the concept of ‘flipped classroom and outcome-based education.’ This mixed approach (blended learning, flipped classroom, and outcome-based education) is described as ‘hybrid learning’ in this study.

Innovations in training programs impact the educational system and the level of students' professional abilities. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate the use of innovative technologies in teaching music and aesthetics with the use of intelligent technology. Students from various music schools in Beijing participated in the study: elementary (112 respondents), middle (123 respondents), and high school (98 respondents) (areas: piano, violin, and percussion), a total of 343 participants. Assessment of the students' level of proficiency took place in several stages: comparing the students' level of proficiency with that they had before the experiment, for this purpose an average eight-point system was used. The next stage consisted of a comparison of grades for the final academic concert. The results showed that the greatest improvement was seen in the percussion class and the least in the violin class. Piano students showed an average result in the correlation comparison, but their level was the highest in the final academic concert, 48.55% of the students showed a level of skill above average. While 39.13% of the violin students scored "excellent" and "good". The same level among the students of "percussion instruments" was shown by 35.71% of the students. Thus, one can conclude that applying intelligent technologies positively impacts students' performance, but it is necessary to be careful in choosing applications and technologies for implementation in the educational process. Further research should be directed at the impact of other applications and programs on learning, as well as ways to improve other music education areas and how they can be changed by intelligent technology use.

The paper compares the effectiveness of the online and blended learning of music during COVID-19. The study involved 140 students from Nanjing Xiaozhuang University in China. The research design: a pre-test and post-test experiment with a control group. The following research findings were obtained: the combination of face-to-face and online learning resulted in significant increases in PK (from 205.72 to 303.40), TPK (from 258.75 to 271.50), PCK (from 271.00 to 295.00) and TPCK (from 261.00 to 293.00) among students in TPACK test, which was significant (p