In 2003, Berklee College of Music launched Berklee Shares, a Web site with more than 170 free faculty-authored music lessons. The site has been visited by over half a million unique users. People worldwide have downloaded its lessons tens of thousands of times.

Berklee Shares is:

• Individual self-contained music lessons developed by Berklee faculty and alumni.

• Free and open to the music community around the world.

• A growing library of MP3 audio, QuickTime movie, and interactive PDF files.

• A glimpse into the educational opportunities provided by Berklee.

The Berklee Shares program allows anyone to have a little bit of Berklee for free. These stand-alone lessons are excerpts from Berklee Press books and DVDs, and Berklee Music online courses. They are multimedia lessons in PDF format with MP3s, QuickTime videos, and interactive Flash activities embedded in the PDF files. Topics include performance technique, improvisation, production, music business, and core music studies. A growing number of Berklee Shares lessons were created independently to supplement Berklee Musiconline courses, such as the “Drum notation in Finale" lesson, created to help online Arranging 1 students add drum notation to their scores.

The following image is a screen shot from a Berklee Shares lesson entitled “Conducting as an Ear Training Tool” a multimedia, Berklee Shares lesson by Matt Marvuglio, Dean of Performance. The embedded video shows Marvuglio conducting and explaining the pattern.

All of the lessons at Berklee Shares -- from Afro-Cuban conga drumming to setting up a recording studio -- are protected by a Creative Commons license. Anyone can use and trade the material provided she or he agrees to the terms set by the school: Users may not alter or sell the material, and must credit the original source.

Berklee recently conducted a survey of Berklee Shares users, and we were moved and delighted by the many stories of musicians whose lives were affected by having access to these free materials. Many stories of life transformations and appreciation have come to us as testaments to the affect that musical mentorship can have.

Some highlights:

• Jemi Sitanayah was living in his native Indonesia when he came upon the Berklee Shares site. He downloaded many lessons: music production, improvisation, turntable technique. This gave him the “Berklee bug,” and today, he is a student in the Music Production & Engineering program.

• Costa Rican music teacher, Sergio Molina, gives Berklee Shares lessons to his students, and feels they are the best affordable audiovisual resources he has found. Many other music teachers have reported using Berklee Shares lessons with their students, in places such as Nigeria, Guatemala, and Brazil.

• A jazz saxophonist in Croatia downloaded “Basic Hard Rock Saxophone” (excerpted from The Berklee Practice Method: Tenor Sax, by Jim Odgren and Bill Pierce), and also several of the video lessons by Joe Lovano. These opened new doors for him, creatively, and helped him think about “the beat” in ways that he had never considered before.

• Felicity Turgeon, a social worker in Lowell, MA, was working with a young drummer who was trying to escape the gang life. She was delighted to find the Berklee Shares drum lessons, during her search for free materials to share with him, and they helped him to support his passion for music and focus on a more constructive life direction.

In Berklee Shares, the grand podium of the Internet allows Berklee to expand its reach and share music education opportunities with aspiring musicians around the world on an unprecedented scale.

Visit the Berklee Shares site.