Dr. John C. Wulff

Web address: www.ghostshirtsolutions.com/player/GSS.jnlp
MUS 101 Rudiments of Music -- Learning Activity Packets

In my experience the challenge of presenting a distance course offering is engaging a student through dynamic and stimulating course content while ensuring the work is being completed timely, accurately, and in its entirety. In addition, quantifying the effectiveness of the materials with student success has proven to be difficult.  The presentation's in this seminar have leveraged proven technologies that will support dynamic and engaging content, but the challenge of ensuring the course content is effective while maximizing student potential is still an unknown. In an effort to remove this uncertainty I have decided in addition to leveraging the technologies we have discussed to also leverage a course offering framework produced by Ghost Shirt Solutions.

This framework will allow faculty and course administrators immediate statistical feedback on student progress as well as details on the overall course effectiveness. Faculty are able to view course statistics through a visual dashboard that encompasses high level information, (such as login's and course progress) as well as low level details on student activity. I find the internet to be an invaluable resource for materials that re-enforce topics presented within the course. I often include external links to supplement my course materials, but I have never had an easy way to quantify the effectiveness of these resources. The framework allows the professor to  track all activity within the course, including any external links that are accessed through the embedded browser.  Most importantly, the dashboard allows me to cross reference student activity with quiz and test results gaging success and failures of the course presentation and materials.  I am then able to refactor my course to maximize student success. The framework also allows the html pages to be rendered and dynamically associated with streaming mp3 audio files. Each page can be transitioned dynamically, triggered by second markings within the mp3 file. This allows me to supplement static course content with background audio that will enhance groupings of course content.

The course content for my music offering was created using standard HTML, or XTML, embedding most of the technologies we covered during this seminar.  I created 7 HTML pages (based upon my doctoral project of Learning Activity Packets) that each demonstrate a technology we discussed during this seminar. External MP3 and MPv4 files were leveraged as well as demonstrations of internal and external you tube references. The course pages were created external to the  framework and then referenced within the framework using a simple import tool. The  framework leverages Java Web Start for client deployment and requires no additional software for the student or faculty member to install. The framework is launched by embedding a standard http link within blackboard. All of the course materials will be externally hosted and rendered by NVCC are accessible external to the Ghost Shirt Solutions framework.

Three complete Learning Activity Packets (LAPs) were developed from an eventual sequenced array of 13 LAPs for a one semester Rudiments of Music Course (MUS 101) as the musical input for the project. The course is designed for musically gifted secondary school or junior college students who believe that they may be interested in pursuing a major in applied music/music education in college. The course is designed to use individualized Learning Activity Packets (LAPs) to allow flexibility for use either in class or private study situations. Thus, the student may pace the progress through each individual LAP and work independently as study time becomes available. This project includes three LAPs: (i) Sound: Pitch and Dynamics, (2) Musical Timbre, and (3) Rhythm and Musical Notation: Meters. The three LAPs were subjected to a formative evaluation based upon input from instructor observations, student evaluations and overall statistical analysis. The results of this formative evaluation are interviews, a panel of content and curriculum development specialists, and a comparison of pre-test and post-test student responses.