Synergic Work Incoming New Goals for Higher Education Music Institutions Erasmus Project

Project Title

Synergic Work Incoming New Goals for Higher Education Music Institutions

Project Key Action

This project related with these key action: Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices

Project Action Type

This project related with this action type : Strategic Partnerships for higher education

Project Call Year

This project’s Call Year is 2018

Project Topics

This project is related with these Project Topics: New innovative curricula/educational methods/development of training courses; Research and innovation; Open and distance learning

Project Summary

Context/background:
When we started, there were many different local approaches and challenges both in implementing the Bologna process and to enhance the results from traditional mobility; participants approach to technology was non existing or basic: “technology does not fit into music education” was the common case. The Covid19 pandemic hit when the project was halfway, making distance teaching tools a “must do” activity, far beyond the expected project audience. This suddenly raised to “survival importance” many of the activities in the project, especially the ones to help teachers and students to use technology (example: “how to use microphones and audio monitors correctly”, etc) . Covid19 also caused problems to many in presence activities, as for large ensembles, causing us to redefine the activities in O2 and O3. We had to expand our help desk and support activities in a few days to cope with an increase of support requests from 10 per month to 200 per day.
Achieved Objectives:
• a significant set of distance learning new modules were developed for various instruments and ensembles, larger than foreseen.
– students could access modules which were not available in their institutions
– institutions developed a consolidated collaboration, enabling activities beyond the project (additional masterclasses, new collaborations)
– new relationships established among teachers and students, resulting in further proposed physical mobility when the pandemic permitted it again.
– different and new teaching practices, enabled by technology, were tested to support distance learning.
– LoLa was strongly enhanced: multiple sites to interact in real time, video support with additional cameras, additional audio sampling support,other features requested by teachers and students were added (better user interface, new way of controlling audio and video settings, better record/playback facility)
– pedagogical studies were performed to understand the new environment, including the “collective teaching” approach allowed by LoLa technology
– support training material – tutorials, examples etc – was developed to fulfil the “show me a video how-to” way of learning, instead of the traditional “read the manual” approach.
Expected audience:
– the number of students and teachers from the participating institutions was in line with expectations, despite the long pause imposed by Covid19 restrictions.
Additional results:
– we applied the know-how developed for LoLa and high performance networks also to other lower profiles tools (see Zoom, eduMEET, Teams,…) and to home network environments, supporting also “at home” distant music teaching;
– we collected input and suggestions from an audience which was many order of magnitude larger than the expected one in the project, which then turned back with additional feedback and suggestions.
New approach in roles and collaborations:
The project participants developed new way of collaboration, and all was learning from the other areas of expertise: this expanded to further parties ,other academic networks (ARNES, EEnet, LITnet, DeIC, Uninett) and other HME (EAMT Tallin, LMTA Vilnius for technical tests and DKDM Copenhagen, RC den Haag, Music Academy Oslo and Conservatorio Tomadini Udine for teaching modules) and even beyond the traditional set of HMEs, into smaller schools creating the kernel of a distance learning enabled and “ready” institutions. In total we involved more than 80 teachers, and 350 students in the formal SWING project sessions.
Impact:
Students and teachers enriched their training and now are more technology friendly. Institutions deployed more international and harmonised curricula , teachers exchanged a lot of information, learned from each other, involved students in discussions, creating a truly different learning environment. Also outside the project boundary there are many more institutions, including medium/small ones, which now are aware of technical tools, and formed a significant information exchange community about this. On a “information dissemination list” which we created out of the support contacts the project received, there are now about 400 people.
Dissemination:
Two multiplier events were delivered. One had to go online in conjunction with the 2020 AEC congress. We presented the first results, including the studies about the effect of using distance teaching tools, and presented LoLa v2.0 version. As it was online we had 420 participants, well above the expected numbers. The final multiplier event managed to go in presence again with the AEC 2021 congress, we had 85 attendees plus 46 online ones. In this we disseminated the final results, and discussed how new collaborations can take place now.
Long Term Benefits:
European higher music education started to become truly international, with better equal opportunities for students and teachers. The knowledge database created by SWING project will help in understanding the way to go.

Project Website

https://www.swing-project.eu/

EU Grant (Eur)

Funding of the project from EU: 377944,69 Eur

Project Coordinator

CONSORTIUM GARR & Country: IT

Project Partners

• CONSERVATORIO DI MUSICA GIUSEPPE TARTINI di Trieste
• ASSOCIATION EUROPEENNE DES CONSERVATOIRES, ACADEMIES DE MUSIQUE ET MUSIKHAOCHSCHULEN AISBL
• UNIVERZA V LJUBLJANI
• UNIVERSITAT FUR MUSIK UND DARSTELLENDE KUNST WIEN