Participation, Ownership, and Presence
Learning Music History
Online with Social Media
Miikka Salavuo
Lauri Väkevä
Sibelius Academy

The Case
A Pedagogical Online Course
on the History of African American Music

Target Groups
Music education students
Students of the Open University
 Music students, music educators, classroom teachers…

Previous Emphasizes of LMS’s

Repetition
Promote Exam
of
recall strategies
information

Send an assignment to
teacher

The Emphasizes of This Course

Discovery and Making Skills for
construction connections, lifelong
of knowledge understanding learning

• Dewey..
• Communities of practice (Wenger)
• Connectivism (Siemens)
• Communal Constructivism
(Holmes)

Presence

Student Tasks

Two Blog Articles

a. “My Musical History”
to bring out student’s own expertise
and to engage her in progressive
inquiry & to the use of online tools

b. “Introduction of a Song”
to introduce the student to one chosen
perspective in popular music study
& to further encourage participation

Lyrics
Social
meaning Performers’
Song backgrounds
Musical
roots
Musical
roots

A Wiki Article
(Group Task )
To encourage the students to social
networking & collaborative
production of public learning
materials

Research Methods

Questionnaires
at the beginning
for all, and at the
end
for those who left
the course

3 group
interviews,
thematized

Results

Online collaboration not as active as
expected

The course played too small role in
students’ daily lives

Online environment for everyday use needed!

Most students are not used to social
media as learning environment…yet?

Learning with social media requires initiative,
motivation and self-directed skills

More interaction and increased presence
compared to traditional online courses

Ideas were learned from others

Many students seem to prefer a
lecture-based model

Face-to-Face interaction highly valued,
even romanticized

Students expected subject content to be
pre-defined by the teacher

Learning = Being able to repeat
pre-given content?

Student-provided Reasons
for Drop Outs

Lack of face-to-face interaction
Lack of teacher presence
Students’ busy schedules
Demand for initiative learning
Small courses in a separate environment left
behind

“I have been accustomed to… that it’s
enough that you sit down, someone
gives you info and you come and get
credit..”
“I am not so interested to learn, that I
would on my own initiative drag my self
to a computer and start tapping these
assignments..”

Ownership
Contradicts with lack of initiative
The online environment did provide
some possibilities and starting points to
increase ownership

Participation
Students visited each others’ pages
and gave some comments
Sense of community emerged when
students were divided into smaller
groups

Presence
Teacher presence requested
The course was not present in
students’ daily lives
“Recent activities” function increased
the presence

Conclusions
• A change in the culture of learning
takes time
• Social media is promising, but
does not yet suit well to the
learning culture