Context/background: Various challenges still exists in the European Higher Music Education scenario: still different local approaches and curricula in the internationalization of music education can make reciprocal recognition of credits, diplomas and activities problematic, slowing a full deployment of the Bologna principles. We need to enhance the current physical mobility (limited by time, budget and other constraints) and curricula harmonization, introducing new technologies to improve current methodologies. Creating new professional technology skills and educational approaches for teachers and students is just starting and needs a boost. The difficulties faced by qualified musicians in accessing relevant employment, requires a wider international approach in education. Students and teachers still miss a good blend with digital era technologies, which would help them to be more successful in their career. Objectives: • create a set of distance learning new modules, enlarging the offer of the existing learning methods and curricula, fostering continued joint activities (joint courses) after the project ending by the involved institutions and others. • accelerate the development of a deeper transnational collaboration among institutions. • enhance the quality of international mobilities of students and teachers, supplementing the physical mobility with a continuous virtual one: this will greatly optimize the overall educational process (just consider the benefits of a virtual audition, for example, before a physical mobility starts); • enrich current pedagogical opportunities provided by mobility practices by using and enhancing for the specific education needs a technology platform designed for fully interactive simultaneous musical distance learning (LoLa) • provide exhaustive, friendly and simple training material and documentation on how to use and deploy such new pedagogical aids and tools in the new environment. Number and profile of participants: Three higher music education institutions, with a long record in high quality international education and collaboration, and a deep expertise in use and development of technology for distance education (Conservatorio Tartini, Akademija za glasbo Univerze v Ljubljani and Universitaet fur Musik und darstellende kunst), one advanced national research and education network (GARR) with an outstanding expertise in technology transfer and support with the arts and humanities area, and the European Association of Music Conservatories (AEC), fostering since many years information exchange, development and enhancements in the higher music education institutions. All the partners with a long international experience and an excellent knowledge of their environment. They will involve about 300 students and teachers in the project and technology developers, information and documentation makers and collect relevant feedback from the community. Description of activities: • creation of new remote learning modules not yet deployed in the curricula of participating institutions, enhancing the number and quality of subjects available for students, and promoting a higher harmonization in the education programmes. • creation of a large set of documentation and guides available to the global music (and beyond) education community for an easier adoption of these new technologies and methods. • enhancement and deployment of new features in LoLa and other specialized tools for music education, in strict collaboration with students and teachers. • dissemination and information exchange activities, in order to outreach a large number of institutions, in a scenario which still have in Europe many medium/little music academies with limited international exposition Methodology: Create a common working approach where students, teachers, developers, work together in a continuous "test, requirement, development, verification, further feedback and development" cycle, spanning different scenarios of increasing complexity, which also creates valuable interdisciplinary exchanges among participants. The project will also work in synergy with external partners and projects. Expected Results: • availability of new remote learning modules, to be used in curricula of music institutions as increased learning and teaching opportunities • creation of an enhanced set of tools tailored for higher music education • a large adoption of the new physical and virtual mixed mobility paradigm, resulting in an higher level, more international quality education • creation of new joint curricula among institutions Impact: Students and teachers will enrich their training and will have more opportunities. Institutions will deploy more international and harmonized curricula, Teachers will have more opportunities to have the best students and optimize their schedules. Long Term Benefits: European higher music education will become truly international, with better and equal opportunities for students and teachers.
Context/background: When we started, there were many different local approaches and challenges both in implementing the Bologna process and to enhance the results from traditional mobility; participants approach to technology was non existing or basic: "technology does not fit into music education" was the common case. The Covid19 pandemic hit when the project was halfway, making distance teaching tools a "must do" activity, far beyond the expected project audience. This suddenly raised to "survival importance" many of the activities in the project, especially the ones to help teachers and students to use technology (example: "how to use microphones and audio monitors correctly", etc) . Covid19 also caused problems to many in presence activities, as for large ensembles, causing us to redefine the activities in O2 and O3. We had to expand our help desk and support activities in a few days to cope with an increase of support requests from 10 per month to 200 per day. Achieved Objectives: • a significant set of distance learning new modules were developed for various instruments and ensembles, larger than foreseen. - students could access modules which were not available in their institutions - institutions developed a consolidated collaboration, enabling activities beyond the project (additional masterclasses, new collaborations) - new relationships established among teachers and students, resulting in further proposed physical mobility when the pandemic permitted it again. - different and new teaching practices, enabled by technology, were tested to support distance learning. - LoLa was strongly enhanced: multiple sites to interact in real time, video support with additional cameras, additional audio sampling support,other features requested by teachers and students were added (better user interface, new way of controlling audio and video settings, better record/playback facility) - pedagogical studies were performed to understand the new environment, including the "collective teaching" approach allowed by LoLa technology - support training material - tutorials, examples etc - was developed to fulfil the "show me a video how-to" way of learning, instead of the traditional "read the manual" approach. Expected audience: - the number of students and teachers from the participating institutions was in line with expectations, despite the long pause imposed by Covid19 restrictions. Additional results: - we applied the know-how developed for LoLa and high performance networks also to other lower profiles tools (see Zoom, eduMEET, Teams,...) and to home network environments, supporting also "at home" distant music teaching; - we collected input and suggestions from an audience which was many order of magnitude larger than the expected one in the project, which then turned back with additional feedback and suggestions. New approach in roles and collaborations: The project participants developed new way of collaboration, and all was learning from the other areas of expertise: this expanded to further parties ,other academic networks (ARNES, EEnet, LITnet, DeIC, Uninett) and other HME (EAMT Tallin, LMTA Vilnius for technical tests and DKDM Copenhagen, RC den Haag, Music Academy Oslo and Conservatorio Tomadini Udine for teaching modules) and even beyond the traditional set of HMEs, into smaller schools creating the kernel of a distance learning enabled and "ready" institutions. In total we involved more than 80 teachers, and 350 students in the formal SWING project sessions. Impact: Students and teachers enriched their training and now are more technology friendly. Institutions deployed more international and harmonised curricula , teachers exchanged a lot of information, learned from each other, involved students in discussions, creating a truly different learning environment. Also outside the project boundary there are many more institutions, including medium/small ones, which now are aware of technical tools, and formed a significant information exchange community about this. On a "information dissemination list" which we created out of the support contacts the project received, there are now about 400 people. Dissemination: Two multiplier events were delivered. One had to go online in conjunction with the 2020 AEC congress. We presented the first results, including the studies about the effect of using distance teaching tools, and presented LoLa v2.0 version. As it was online we had 420 participants, well above the expected numbers. The final multiplier event managed to go in presence again with the AEC 2021 congress, we had 85 attendees plus 46 online ones. In this we disseminated the final results, and discussed how new collaborations can take place now. Long Term Benefits: European higher music education started to become truly international, with better equal opportunities for students and teachers. The knowledge database created by SWING project will help in understanding the way to go.