Title: GlobalMusix: Contemporary Music Throughout the World
Project Management Team:
- Robin Armstrong, rarmstrong@carrollcc.edu, @robinarmstrong
- Fran Cincotta, fcincotta@carrollcc.edu
- Karen Rege, krege@harford.edu
Target Audience: Highschool and general education college students
Subject: Music / World Music
Target Release Date: Summer 2021
Book Description
Many colleges and universities offer music-appreciation style courses to fulfill humanities and arts general education requirements, and a course in world music increasingly fulfills this objective while offering a globally-focused and diverse curriculum. While several OER texts exist for a European-centered music appreciation course, world music OERs lack number and depth. Additionally, traditional textbooks rarely include balanced amounts of information on both traditional and contemporary musical styles and genres, so even the choices of high-quality commercial textbooks are severely limited. Our open text book will contain the same rich and detailed content that the best commercially available texts offer, balanced between contemporary and traditional styles in order to make a World Music course more broadly accessible to more students.
A World Music survey course can easily be designed as a series of learning objects rather than a staged, directional narrative. After an introductory unit covering the musical elements and contextual analytic tools, individual topics can be ordered according to the needs of an individual instructor. The most common organization of content for world music courses focuses on specific cultures within specific regions. Units based on different cultures and regions are not related to each other, and are therefore self-contained. Independent, self-contained subunits based on different styles, genres, and songs make up these units.
The pedagogical benefit of this type of structure for an OER lies in its flexibility; individual instructors can remix, redistribute, and retain subunits at will. This instructional design will also increase student achievement through relying on learning-centered pedagogies with a wide range of activities and active learning opportunities. The flexibility of the unit-based structure of this OER will facilitate instructor reuse and remix . It will also allow for a variety of skill-oriented, personalized activities that will be designed to engage students. Freely available internet resources facilitates our pedagogy because the web allows crowd sharing and reusable assignments. Assignments aligned with course objectives focusing on gathering and analyzing information will result in identifying new musical examples that can be incorporated into the curriculum. A class project aligned with course objectives focusing on connecting musical sounds to cultural context will result in essays that will be published in public forums such as Medium.com and can be made available as course content. We will use backwards design based principles to align competency- based assessments and student learning outcomes while delivering content that takes into account various cultural values.
Over the summer we’ll need help with:
- Reviewers: folks without musical background so that we can be sure we are clear to a general audience
- Formatting in Pressbooks
- Accessibility checks
- Promotion and adoptions
If you might be interested in helping please email Robin Armstrong at rarmstrong@carrollcc.edu or please comment below and we will get back to you with more specifics.