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The age of virtual music lessons is here.

 

Music teacher conferences such as MTNA’s national conference have offered technology sessions that address distance lessons for several years now.   Many teachers are doing it, and it’s filling a much-needed gap in society’s need for lessons, especially for students in rural areas who don’t have access to music teachers.

 

 

 

 

Pros

• Quality of the teacher:  I believe it is better to have Skype lessons with an excellent teacher than it is to have in-person lessons with a mediocre teacher. Skype gives students even more options to choose from when looking for a teacher since they are not restricted to their small local region.

• Weekly Convenience:   Students don’t have to travel 10 or 20 minutes to their teacher’s studio.  Also, when a student is 5 or 10 minutes late, I give them a courtesy call in case they forgot, but if they live 15 minutes away and they have a 30 or even 45 minute lesson, it’s hardly worth it for them to come late. Lessons online means no missed lessons due to forgetfulness since the student and teacher can connect 30 seconds after the courtesy call.

• Convenience of Recording Lessons: While students always have the option to record their face-to-face lessons, that never happens (at least, in the history of my teaching).  But students can easily record Skype and Google+ lessons for review at a later time with software like Evaer and SuperTinTin (audio only: Pamela, MP3 Skype Recorder, and VodBurner).

• Immediate Practicing: (added 1/13/12) While face-to-face students must drive home before practicing what they learned (which eats up time and tires people out), distance students can practice immediately after the lesson when ideas are fresh and when energy levels are still high.  (Thanks to Joy Morin for pointing this out.)  This is an extra practice session most students will get.  The first practice session will always be of higher quality when it is done immediately than if it were done the next day, and the first practice session is the most important session of the entire week.

• Siblings Don’t Have To Wait: (added 1/13/12) Kids can do their own thing while their siblings have lessons, while in the private studio, they are held hostage until their siblings are done.

• Warming Up: Students can warm up at the piano before their lesson, only stopping seconds before the lesson begins.  The piano student also gets to play their own instrument.  This would let the student show off their best playing to their teacher each week instead of their worst.  (This can also be seen as a con – see below.)

• Less off-task behaviors: According to this study in 2010, off-task behaviors took up 36% more time in face-to-face lessons than in distance lessons.  I suspect part of this might be due to an awkwardness factor that I think we all feel when talking through a webcam.  It’s harder to feel and act as we normally would in front of a webcam than it is when face-to-face. The study also finds that eye contact during distance lessons is more frequent, and this is probably for the same reason.

• Increased student performance: The same study indicates that students spend 22% more time performing during distance lessons than in face-to-face lessons.

• Some Problems More Quickly Diagnosed: Sometimes the technical or musical problems students experience in their lesson can be an unexpected artifact of their unique instrument or practice environment at home.  For example, perhaps the student is afraid to play too loud because of living in an apartment or because family members are asleep (both of these scenarios describe a couple students I’ve taught before). These factors would come out immediately in a webcam lesson, but it might take a few face-to-face lessons for a teacher to figure out why the student doesn’t seem to ever “play out.”

• Don’t Have To Be In The Same Room: Students won’t need to cancel lessons because they had the stomach flu two days before (stomach flus can be contagious for up to two weeks after symptoms have passed). There is also less suffering for everyone: students won’t suffer if their teacher ate onion rings for lunch, and bagpipe teachers have the option of muting their computer speakers while their students play.