Dave Kusek: Berklee Online

So, technology is going to change whatever industry that you are in. I’ll give you an example. Sort of, putting your money where your mouth is here. Berklee College of Music, we’re the largest independent music college in the world. We have about four thousand students on campus. We teach a very contemporary music curriculum, performance on all instruments including turntables, song writing, composition, music business, music therapy, production, engineering, synthesis, song design, film scoring. Berklee is a very progressive place. We were the first to teach electric guitar, we were the first to teach synthesizer, and we decided that we have to pay attention to technology not only internally at the college, but externally. Because if we didn’t, we’re going to miss huge opportunities that perhaps get, see some competition where we didn’t want to see it.
So, we’ve been very careful to use technology on campus, we’re a completely wired campus, wireless network everywhere, we encourage, not quite require but, we encourage every student to have a laptop computer. Nearly 100% of them have laptops; we use Macs here at Berklee. We load those computers up with a common software so that every student and every faculty member in every classroom has the same set of software and common hardware all networked together so that people can communicate and kind of have an idea of what the platform is that you are using to make music. We, a couple of years ago, about five years ago decided well, we better get ourselves hip to teaching music online because the internet is exploding, people are expecting you to have offerings online, but we also had some interesting challenges here that we have 4000 students on campus but we live in the Back Bay of Boston, it’s extremely expensive, it’s crowded, we are crowded is the best word I can use. We are packed into the classrooms we are packed into the dorms. It’s very difficult for us to grow the school on campus because we don’t have anymore space. We bought all the buildings we could around here. So we thought, let’s go and explore creating an online school and this is Berklee Music, which is our online school.
We now have sixty courses up and running online and they mirror the curriculum of the college. Songwriting, Music Business, Music Ed, Producing, Engineering, Arranging, Performing, Guitar. Let me give you an idea of some of the business courses. We have a course on the Future of Music, Inside the Music Industry, Publishing, Legal Aspects of the Music Business, Music Business 101, Self Promoting Musician, How to Get a Job in the Music Industry, Creating Pro-Mo Kits, Web Design. This is just the beginning of our attempt to kind of mirror Berklee online to create a full on, very serious, very professional music school that reaches out to people all over the world who want to experience contemporary music, want to learn about it, but perhaps don’t have the opportunity to come to the U.S. So, this online school reaches out to people in about, I think eighty different countries at the moment. We’ve got over a thousand students online, four thousand on campus, one thousand online. The online thing is growing, very, very quickly and we are beginning to explore ways of teaching online that again, mirror what we are doing at the college. A lot of these courses have software that it is either downloaded or shipped to the student so that there’s recording digital audio editing music notation software, available for each student so that you’re working in an environment online that very closely maps the environment that we have with this laptop program I talked about. I’m just going to play a really quick little movie, just talks about the online school.
Video:
“The college of music that has started it all has started it all again, online. Berkleemusic.com taps into all the same experience that makes Berklee, Berklee. Same renowned faculty, same student body, but with a whole new way for you to join the experience, whatever or wherever you make it, or mix it, or manage it. Berklee music brings a smart, powerful new way to learn. Your life, on your terms.”

So for example, if you were interested in music production,
Video:
“Welcome to Berklee Music, my name is Michael Beirylo and I’m an associate professor of music synthesis at Berklee College of Music. I have been teaching Production at Berklee for eight years so I have had the opportunity to see many Berklee students develop talents and skills and apply them in very practical ways to music careers all over the world. Practicality is in fact one of the philosophies that shapes the environment here at Berklee. Still, while the focus of music production is practical, all Berklee Music courses guide students in developing an informed musical vision. So, you’re probably wondering what Production classes at Berklee are all about. We currently offer a number of six to twelve week courses focusing on various areas of production. I’m going to guess that one of your next questions would be how do you learn production online? Or what kind of equipment do I need to take this class? To give you a better idea, of what a Berklee Music course is like, click the guided tour button below.
Video:
Getting to class is easy, once you’re enrolled in a class at Berklee Music, you will receive an email with a link to view your personal homepage, a link to your course will appear on your homepage, before the course begins. We begin each course with introductions, meeting your classmates, and your instructor will give you an opportunity to discover and share common interests and begin a network of relationships within the Berklee Music community. This is a good time to familiarize yourself with the website, and the details of the course. Take some time to navigate the course area and read through the course syllabus.
A new lesson is available each week. You’ll work with innovative, interactive tools to help guide you through the learning process. You’ll complete your lessons on your own schedule throughout the week. Begin and end as you need to, at a pace that’s right for you.”

So I’m going to stop there. There are two points that I want to make here, one from the Berklee perspective, we felt that we had to do this in order to keep current with technology and what is happening out in the real world. Music is a global phenomenon so to be able to have a method of reaching out, around the world, to connect with people that are interested in music making. This gives us a platform for doing this. This also is a terrific way for Berklee to partner with other schools which we have begun to do. UCLA in particular is offering a bunch of the Berklee online courses to its student body and we are cooperating with them and we are creating relationships with other institutions around in this case the country, but ultimately around the world so that we can offer a little bit of Berklee to different places and I hope at some point that we are going to be able to offer other perspectives and other courses that are created by other entities to the Berklee community. So it’s a way of networking and partnering and it’s a way of going global using the technology that if we don’t use it, somebody else is going to use it. So that’s one point.
The second point is if you’re in music. If you’re in the publishing business, if you’re in the record business, if you’re in management, if you’re in touring, if you’re in merchandise, whatever you’re doing in music, if you don’t leverage the technology that’s available, if you don’t get out ahead of it, if you’re a big company if you don’t invest in it, and explore what this technology can do for your businesses, you’re going to have your lunch eaten by other people that are going to do that and that’s the lesson of the day from the perspective of these waves of technology that have kind of flown through the music industry and other industries, but music is what I know. You have to pay attention to it, you have to change and transform you always have to keep learning, you have to develop new skills, you have to make hard decisions about maybe the way you do business ought to be changed because the technology makes it cheaper, better, faster, easier, whatever. If you don’t make those changes, you’re going to have a hard time. Witness the record companies today. Didn’t make the changes, having a hard time, pointing fingers, perhaps in the wrong places. That’s the lesson of the day; you have to keep current with technology in music. It is utterly transforming and has transformed the music industry and it’s going to continue to do it for as far out into the future as we can see.