Dear students,
Welcome to the UD Online sections of
MUSC101
Appreciation of Music
This is a rather longish welcome message, but it will help you get started with the course. Most importantly, please be sure to read thoroughly the syllabus! Remember also to contact UD Online regarding exams, registration changes, etc.
FIRST AND MOST IMPORTANT: PRE-COURSE SURVEY!
- Be sure that your computer is set up properly to use Canvas. Follow this link for instructions: http://www1.udel.edu/it/help/canvas/start.html
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As soon as you have access to Canvas, please go to the Pre-Course Survey
that accessible from the "Quizzes" link in the
left-hand white sidebar for the course on Canvas. The most important
things you need to tell me in this survey are these:
- Please indicate what e-mail address you will regularly use for the course. (The only e-mail address of yours that I know officially is the one that Canvas and UDSIS show for my managing the course.) It is important for you to make sure your contact information is correct, because I will likely be sending out messages for the whole class, and at times might need to contact an individual student if a problem develops. Unless I'm away on vacation, I check my e-mail every day, so I hope to answer your questions about the course promptly.
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Also, please let me know whether you are
- a local student (i.e., in northern Delaware, taking exams in Newark at the UD Online Resource Center);
- a student in central or southern Delaware (i.e., taking exams in Dover or Georgetown; or
- a remote student (i.e., taking exams on your own computer with Canvas and proctored by ProctorU).
- Also, in the survey, please give me a little background on your musical experiences. For instance, do you already read music, play an instrument, or sing in a choir or other group? What types or styles of music do you listen to? Where do you enjoy listening to music, at concerts, places for dancing, television, radio, the Internet, television (e.g., MTV)? When do you tend to listen consciously, or just play the music in the background? (For this course it is not necessary that you be able to read or perform music, so if you think you don't have much background, please don't panic, but see below.
NOW, OTHER THINGS TO BEGIN YOUR STUDY
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The syllabus/policies page for the course is on Canvas. Please read the entire syllabus as soon as you can, especially the calendar
at the end. The syllabus indicates the textbook and recordings
that you need to acquire, highlights the grading system, and lists the
dates for your quiz-assignments and exams with links to more
information about them, especially the lists of readings and items for
listening.
- If there is something unclear in the syllabus or in the other Canvas materials, if a URL is broken somewhere, or if it seems I might have omitted something or created an inconsistency, please let me know right away so that I can fix it and notify everyone in the current course as soon as possible.
- Please be sure to keep up on the readings, allow plenty of time for multiple listenings of each assigned recording of a musical piece, turn in your assignments by the dates indicated, and read the instructions about the assignments and exams.
- During the term I may also be sending additional class-wide information by e-mail.
- Given that this course does not have classroom meetings or video lectures, you need to base your study on the assigned textbook (paper or online electronic version), audio recordings, and additional materials on Canvas supplied by the instructor.
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All of your quiz-assignments and exams (as well as the ungraded
surveys) are handled online on Canvas (students in section 195 take the Canvas exams through ProctorU).
These are accessed from "Quizzes" in the left-hand white sidebar on Canvas after you have
logged in.
- Although the assignments are available for long before the due-dates and you will have one attempt (with multiple sittings/sessions) to work on each quiz-assignment (so that you don't have to complete a quiz-assignment in one sitting), you will need to be sure to submit each assignment by the date that it is due (this is 11:00 p.m. on the date indicated in the calendar in the syllabus).
- Access to the exams on Canvas is limited to the assigned weeks and to the specific computer locations where they are taken.
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Check your computer system now to make sure that your web-browser is
compatible with Canvas is working properly and that you can access
the course materials on Canvas as soon as UD Online makes it available
to you.
- You need to use Canvas with a regular desktop or laptop computer (not a mobile device such as a cellphone, iPhone, iPad, tablet, etc.), and preferably a wired internet connection, or, if wireless, a secured wireless connection.
- Also, you need to have RealPlayer, Winamp, or Windows Media Player (or at least something else that can play MP3 and MIDI files). If you have a problem, let me know right away.
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Your first readings from the textbook start with Part One of The Enjoyment of Music, 13th edition (EoM for short), shown here:
The first "part" (set of chapters) of this textbook constitutes the most fundamental of readings you will have on the elements (materials) of music in this course. You need to start absorbing these concepts and terms in order to work with the online assignments. To go along with the readings about the materials of music, I have placed on Canvas some supplementary outlines (required reading) on those topics, as well as some other (mostly) short examples of complete pieces to highlight certain parameters like meter, rhythm, and form. If you have access to a computer that can play MIDI (your web-browser probably is already configured for it), you can use these aural examples to reinforce your understanding of material presented in your textbook. - A significant part of your studying will involve listening to pieces from the online digital resources at W.W. Norton that go with your textbook. (These are available via online-streaming with purchase of the textbook in online electronic form from W.W. Norton or with new copies of the paper textbook.) You will not be responsible for learning every piece among those recording, but most of them are assigned, and you will need to be able to recognize them in the known-listening identification sections of the exams and to answer questions about them on exams and quiz-assignments. The Listening Lists are linked in the general list of course links (on the course homepage in canvas) and in the calendar at the end of the syllabus.
- You are encouraged to listen freely to any and all of the other pieces for extra practice at listening and to other pieces among the online digital resources at Norton to reinforce your perception of basic materials of music, if you have time during this term.
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Concerning the listening assignments, you are required to listen to each entire assigned piece or movement, preferably multiple times -- be it an aria, a chorus, a symphonic poem, an opera scene, or selected
movements from a larger work.
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This course has three exams. There is a sample exam on Canvas for you to look at. Unlike probably most exams you've had,
the exams for this course have an important listening component.
All exams are taken online with Canvas.
- Students in or near northern Delaware typically take their exams at the UD Online Resource Center.
- Those in Kent or Sussex counties typically take their exams in Dover or Georgetown, respectively.
- Remote students can take their exams from home, as long as they have the proper setup. (Go to the ProctorU website.) They can take the exams on the same days as are available for students at the testing site in Newark.
- Note: As of Summer 2013, ProctorU charges $25 per exam to proctor your work.
- Feel free to contact me (lneff@udel.edu) any time via e-mail for clarification or discussion about specific questions that you may have, especially at the beginning of the term if you have had minimal musical experience, have read and tried to understand the early readings about the elements of music and such, and the MIDI files mentioned above are not seeming to help enough, also if you have a question about course policies, etc. In addition, contact UDel IT (call 302-831-6000, or send e-mail to consult@udel.edu with a cc: to me) if something with Canvas is not working (e.g., a link, a module, the site itself).
FINALLY...
In essence, in this kind of course, you are learning a new skill (or, for some students, learning how to enhance some already acquired abilities or knowledge), and that factor alone can easily require you to take more time than might be needed for some other kinds of courses where the emphasis is on learning a body of knowledge primarily from reading.Many students do not manage their time well in taking a distance-learning course. You may think that it would be convenient to wait until the last minute to study or to complete assignments, but it's likely that, if you do, you will not do well in this class or learn very much about music.
You need to listen repeatedly to the pieces we will study this term during the period before an exam to which a set of pieces is associated, and spread out your listening and reading over as many days as you can, rather than try to cram a lot into a small time-span -- especially for a short session during summer or winter term.
This course is an elective for you -- you're not music majors, but I'm really glad you are taking this course, and I don't expect you to develop the kind of expertise that music majors would have to develop. In addition to learning about eras of western music history and various trends in musical style, your goal in MUSC101 -- as well as my goal for you as instructor -- should be that you learn each assigned piece really well by listening to it many times and by concentrating upon what you are hearing. So, until that magic point is presumably reached, it would do little to put the music on "in the background" while you do something else. You need to listen to each piece actively, to think about the treatment of the elements of music as they are used in each piece, to try to notice new things each time, and to reflect upon what is special about the work, the composer, and the era that produced the composer and the piece. The textbook can help you with these things.
This course CAN be a life-changing experience if you will allow it to be. With regard to this latter point, I should highlight for you something that Prof. Larry Peterson would send in his welcome e-mail to the MUSC101 students when he was teaching the online sections until 2002: "One of the other truths I have discovered about long distance courses is that they require MORE time rather than LESS time compared to a course taught in a traditional classroom. That may not be true for other long-distance course but it is true of this music course. So please plan accordingly."
I hope you find the course stimulating and useful.
Don't forget to fill out the pre-course survey as requested above!
Best wishes, and welcome!
Lyle K. Neff -- mailto:lneff@udel.edu
http://udel.edu/~lneff/