What can an elite music conservatory gain by offering access to its courses to the masses?

Rebecca J. Rosen

The most selective college in the country -- the hardest school to get into -- isn't in the Ivy League or West Point, NY. It's not an engineering college or a medical school. It's the Curtis Institute of Music, a tiny conservatory of classical music in Philadelphia which can boast, according to US News and World Report, an admission rate of 3.2 percent.

And which, starting soon, will offer courses on Coursera.

That's kind of a big deal. Curtis counts among its alumni some of the most famous musicians of the last century (Leonard Bernstein went there) and some of the most successful musicians of the current one (like Alan Gilbert, current music director of the New York Philharmonic). The school only enrolls enough students to fill an orchestra and an opera company (that's 166, at the moment), and all students attend for free.

So the low admission rate makes sense.

Curtis has long been known as an elite place, but it will offer two courses through Coursera next year. What will they be like, and what does that mean?

"So much of Curtis's work is one-on-one," David Ludwig, the school's chair of Performance Studies, told me Thursday. As a conservatory, the work of the school mostly happens in private lessons and small seminars. "One of our unofficial mottos here is 'Learn by Doing,'" said Ludwig.

Now, neither of the two courses Curtis will offer soon (the start date for both is TBA) will teach students how to play an instrument or write music. They're both music appreciation classes. The first, taught by Ludwig and another Curtis professor, Jonathan Coopersmith, is "A History of Western Music through Performance." The second, taught by Curtis faculty member and pianist Jonathan Biss, will examine Beethoven through his piano sonatas.

Both focus on performance -- the doing of music -- but no one quite knows yet how much students will "do." Ludwig said he and all the MOOC instructors hoped that Curtis's classes would involve some "interaction," though he said, "What will that look like specifically? We're not sure yet. But abig part of Coursera is that it's not just a do-it yourself video service." The Curtis faculty knows, he said, that the intimate, intense Curtis curriculum won't and can't scale, so it hopes to work with Coursera to find something that will.

Read more from the original source:
You Can Now Take Classes From the Most Selective College in the Country on Coursera