On July 19th, Practicing Musician announced the Music Educator Online-Learning Project (MEOLP) to crowdsource content that will be completely free for K-12 educators and their students forever. More than 125 music educators volunteered after a single Facebook post. Over the last six weeks, we’ve created a phenomenal amount of materials and organized it all into Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides. What that means is that you can easily distribute via the learning management system you already know how to use without having to learn how to use any new technology. Visit the Master Folder for K-12 Educators to view our growing library of materials.

MEOLP was founded based on the simple notion that everyone has to do extra work this year, so we might as well organize our efforts. By organizing efforts, each individual does less work because no one is reinventing the wheel.

Now we’re ready to start producing beginning low brass content. Through your collaboration with our team and the educators who have already joined forces on this project, we can quickly create a completely free student AND teacher centered space for online music learning.

The process looks like this:

This isn’t a ploy to get free labor to build out our own library. The content you create will be owned by you—the educators—and our library will be available to you free of charge. Your content will never be available on our for-profit consumer side, but the entire library of content (ours included) will be downloadable for students who do not have internet access at home.

Beginning low brass will take only 60 days from start to finish. To clarify, our “beginning” is essentially the same scope and sequence as a year 1 method book. By the time we’re done, every music educator and music student will have asynchronous tools for beginning euphonium, french horn, and tuba.

Here is how that looks:

Beginning Low Brass Launch

We will provide step-by-step instructions and training to each volunteer and assign specific tasks so no one has to reinvent the wheel. Volunteer roles include:

1 – Project Manager

6 – Tuba specialists to record video tutorials that we assign

6 – French horn specialists to record video tutorials that we assign

6 – Euphonium specialists to record video tutorials that we assign

5 – Video editors to edit the tutorials

6 – Sheet music composers/arrangers

6 – Content managers to upload the video tutorials and sheet music to Practicing Musician’s site

3 – Curriculum coordinators to organize all video tutorials and sheet music into Google Slides assignments for easy distribution via any learning management system educators already know how to use

3 – Lesson plan writers to fill in our lesson plan templates for each video tutorial so that educators who use our content can spend less time worrying about paperwork and more time focused on what they love to do – teach!

Click HERE to learn more about each role and volunteer for the beginning low brass portion of the Music Educator Online-Learning Project.

Spread the word to your colleagues. It’s a good thing if too many people volunteer, that simply means we may be able to release the content early!

This project is being led by Practicing Musician’s founder and CEO, Jake Douglass. Feel free to reach out to him at any time by emailing [email protected] or by calling (206)854-6076. He’s here to help.