To organize efforts, the Practicing Musician team is offering to teach you how to create high quality content at home with technology you already own. Then, we’ll host the video tutorials, compositions, and assignments in sequential order on our site for free. Through your collaboration with our team and the 145+ 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:

The content you create will be owned by you—the educators—and our library will be available to you free of charge. All content will also be downloadable for students who do not have internet access at home. In addition, we’ve developed methods to easily distribute content hosted on our site via Google Classrooms, Canvas, email, and other LMS you may already know how to use.

We’re also working with writers of the National Core Arts Standards and Model Cornerstone Assessments to develop standards based Zoom/Google Meets teaching methodologies. Together, we have already designed 23 Synchronous Learning Best Practices with standards-based assessments.

We currently seek volunteers to focus solely on creating original compositions of method book-style exercises and arrangements of public domain songs. Volunteer’s average time commitment is 10 hours over the course of 3 weeks. You will receive Zoom training, instructional documents, ongoing support, and a lesson sequence to ensure your compositions and/or arrangements will be useful within the context of our online method. Click HERE to join the project.

By volunteering, you will have the chance to join both the current project and future projects. You may join as many or as little projects as you wish, and you may ask to be taken off the roster at any point in time. We just humbly request that you finish each project you start by your given deadline so that volunteers creating video tutorials, organizing your content, and creating assignments in subsequent projects can start on time.

Every time you volunteer for a new project, you will be considered a Founding Member of that project. Founding Members are different than traditional project members because there are a limited number of new projects.  In contrast, traditional project members will go back and refine the content created during old projects based on the peer review process integrated into our site.

As a Founding Member, you will receive the following after you complete your assigned tasks:

• Your photo, district, and school(s) or organization on the Founding Members of the specific project’s page on our website.

• One personalized social media post thanking you for your contribution with your photo, district, favorite quote about the benefits of music education, and school(s) or organization.

• A Certificate of Acknowledgement that you are a founding member of the Music Educator Online-Learning Project.

• Resume worthy experience (college/graduate students).

• The knowledge that you will have helped hundreds of thousands (soon to be millions!) of students in music programs across the United States access EdTech and a quickly growing library of content for free. We have even seen activity from music programs in Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, the Philippines, South Korea, and France since we launched our service at the beginning of the 2020-21 school year!

• The knowledge that you have played a role in helping your own students access EdTech and a quickly growing library of content for free.

We will also throw a virtual celebration for the Founding Members of each project once the content has been launched!

Spread the word to your colleagues. The more educators volunteer, the less work will be required of each educator.

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.