Educational Technologies

While developing distance learning courses, the first thing to focus on was to acquire the know-how in delivering knowledge using new transmission channels. As musical education is turning nowadays to the Internet we also focused on the evaluating and than increasing the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) skills for all actors involved in the process.

Consequently, students and tutors were asked to assess their own level of skills in the use of ICT before starting to work within the programme. As it was shown in this exercise, in musical areas, there is a lack of such skills and therefore our department suggested that the introduction of new technologies as part of the distance learning process should require substantial preparation and support in order to increase the ICT skills. There is also important to mention that the course providers and tutors that are involved in distance learning programmes need to be retrained in order to have up-to-date knowledge regarding the instructional and assessment design methodologies.

For creating materials it's important to work in a course team. In our first step we have had a PHARE Grant for developing distance learning methods in musical field, and then we have wrote a guide for teachers with models and elements in distance education courses. The context of the guide covers the basic requirements of distance learning methodology:

• information and its resources
• research tools and their use
• research methodology