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Hi, I am working on a course for piano teachers who are teaching students online. I am curious to get the student's perspective, occasionally there is a disconnect between what teachers think their students want and what they actually want.

So some questions:

What surprised you about online lessons?
What do you wish your teacher did differently when teaching you?
Why did you start taking online lessons to begin with?
Are you happy taking online lessons?
Do you have advice for future online teachers?
Do you have advice for future online students?
What might have been different at the beginning to make it easier to transition from in-person to online?
How did you find a teacher?
Why online?

Thanks for your time. I would love to make the online learning experience really awesome for students, your help paves the way for future online students.

Sarah

Hi Sarah, do you mean online as through skype, or do you mean online as in video lessons?

Do you mean, you record a video and everyone download and watch your video or both the teacher and the student have a camera and see each other live ?

Ive done lessons by video and liked it very much. It seems that the thinking is if one cant smell the person in the room, it doesnt qualify as "a teacher" but i think online is great.

Like a few others, I was hung up on "on-line" teaching because it can take various forms. When you are creating this course for teachers, are you thinking of a particular form, or presenting several? I also had a thought that teachers might collectively share their ideas and experiences which may be a bit different than one person teaching it as a course based on the perspective they have gained - but that's getting beyond your post.

So I'm back to my original question: whether you have a particular vision of on-line lessons that you're thinking of, where you are asking our experiences and feedback.

Trying to ask the actual questions.
Actually I can't answer some of the questions in their present form. For example: "What do you wish your teacher did differently when teaching you? and this goes together somewhat with the observation occasionally there is a disconnect between what teachers think their students want and what they actually want."

The operative word for me is dialogue and consultation, because we are adults, because this is a new teaching form that needs tweaking and so one tweaks. I don't wish my teacher does xx; we talk about it. I'm interested, for those here working with teachers on-line, whether it's similar for you?

I've worked on-line in various ways and still do.
- There are the type of platform lessons, where the ArtistWorks format is probably the most familiar to everyone. A teacher has many video lessons which are organized into levels and categories. Students register, can submit videos of their work and get video feedback which all registered students can see and learn from. It functions a bit like a masterclass. There is support material in the form of notation, explanations, and links. One such teacher also offers private one-on-one to supplement "as needed". I've found some senior and excellent teachers that way. This is usually in the area of violin.

- There are the face-to-face lessons over the Internet, often regularly with the same teacher over months or years. That is probably what you are talking about. There is no reason why this has to be structured exactly like a class lesson, because you have different things available. You also don't have to limit yourself to screen time. For example, theory homework can be exchanged through a cloud base such as Dropbox with mutual access. Real-time can create distortions - sound files and video recordings can be submitted the same way, or saved to private Youtube giving only the teacher access.

I work both ways that I described.

In regard to advice:
- Setup, on both sides. A first time, especially with no experience, will probably be a drill checking the setup and learning how to work together in that environment. At this point I have a permanent place for my camera, and my teacher told me what he wants to see. Audio is by clip-on microphone, XLR, going into a sound mixer along with the DP's audio. You both want all material to be at hand before you start: pencils, music, computer rebooted etc. First minutes is a kind of "com check".

- A teacher can't tap out a beat while the student plays, because the signals will mess up the timing. Find another way.

- Signals go one-way, so if the student plays and the teacher says "stop", that "stop" won't get through. In the same room, if both of you are talking, you will hear that both of you are talking.

- The physical-technical side is a lot harder to get at on-line. Actually,Sarah, I'd be interested in what your thoughts are about that one.

- You can supplement with recorded videos and audio files, and also written material. I think this may present a logistics problem for the teacher - in addition to teaching during the lesson, how much free time do you want to spend examining your student's playing in off-hours through those videos and audioclips - or how will you handle them?


Because if you run into, or across, a superb teacher, you're not going to pass that up.

Sarah, I don't think I am alone in saying we'd be interested in your thoughts on our thoughts. A couple of questions were asked too. I've popped to this thread more than once out of curiosity.

Hi Sarah, I'll have a go at answering your questions. I've just started taking online lessons at the beginning of this year, so my experience is limited. I'm currently playing grade 3-4 pieces.


That they were possible. And once I got started, how effective they are.


Not much. I'm getting on very well with my teacher, and have no current desire for her to change anything.


Several reasons, but mostly that I wasn't able to find anyone locally. I knew I needed lessons to keep me on track, so I expanded my horizons to consider online teachers.


Yes, very.


Just the general comment that online teaching seems to require skills slightly different from in-person lessons, for instance, how to correct a hand position without physical touch, how to make notes on the score, any number of things that have to be done a bit differently by an online teacher. I think a teacher would need to be prepared for that, in order to keep those differences from getting in the way of the teaching.


One thing that nearly held me back was the perceived need to invest in a load of equipment prior to starting lessons. Luckily, the online school I joined was very encouraging to just jump in with the equipment that I had - basically the built in camera and microphone in my laptop, which I placed on a music stand next to the piano. After a month of lessons, I bought a better camera (which also comes with a better microphone). In a few more months I hope to upgrade the microphone again. So, the advice would be, if money is not flowing freely, it's possible to get started without sinking a load of it into expensive equipment. Of course, you should discuss this with prospective teachers, as some may not be willing to put up with this!


Not applicable, I didn't have an in-person teacher before starting online. I had in-person lessons decades ago, but I didn't really feel that I made a transition.


Lots of research, including searching this forum and then asking forum members who had posted about their online lessons for recommendations. That was how I ultimately selected my online teacher.


As noted above, I was unable to find someone locally. Also, I don't drive and live in a rural area, which narrowed the field considerably - I would need someone who I could either get to on public transport or who would come to me. Online solves that problem nicely.

I hope this helps!

Online lessons with a teacher through Skype.

It so great to get the student perspective. I also take online lessons with a jazz guy (Dave Frank) who is in NYC and vocal lessons with a woman in Oregon.

Here is what I am learning so far from this post and from others from a facebook group (teachpianoonline) and an istagram account. (The social media stuff is new to me but necessary if I want insights)

Teachers definitely want to have online students. They find the idea of different hours appealing. They have no idea how to find students. (which I why I am wondering how you all found teachers, I don't have difficulty finding students, but I have been teaching online for 8 years, and am not looking for new ones)

There is concern about having the right setup, though the comment by elenmirie about worrying about having the right equipment worries everyone on both sides of the computers.

If you asked me 5 years ago if it was OK to have a lesson using a cell phone, I would have looked at you if you were an idiot. Really, it was me who was the idiot. Cellphone technology is amazing. At the very least it is good to have it as a back-up, but it is all several of my students have. We have great lessons.

When talking to people who haven't had online lessons, the comment that most often comes up is, "I need to have a person in the room." (you need to smell them). I think if you have the mindset that the lessons should be the same, it is going to be harder to get started, but if you have the idea that online lessons are different, but great teaching is still great teaching, it doesn't matter so much.

Some other advice I give to teachers is that their platforms and set-ups are less important than those of their students. In some of the countries I teach, certain platforms perform poorly, Skype for instance.

More questions for you:
what programs do you use for video chatting?
How do you manage materials?
Do you have iPads or tablet computers?
Where in the world are you?
Have you heard of Music Traveler (it is an Airbnb- like app which allows people to find pianos to play when they travel)? One of my students is Canadian but travels to Germany on business. He still has lessons because he travels, not me.
Would you recommend online lessons to friends?
Would you ever be interested in having meet-ups with other students who take online lessons exclusively?
What do you do for recitals?
Do you play for yourself or do you like playing for others?

Thanks again for your input, I love online teaching and want others to share the same success.

Sarah

This Music Traveller thing - I'm going to Dublin in August for WorldCon, wonder if I could find a practice instrument there? Ireland doesn't seem to come up on the website currently.

When I was researching online lessons, I came across Sum Dum Guy on Youtube who insisted that both teacher and student needed MacBooks, and the student needed a £200 microphone as well.

He was the same guy that I'd seen previously suggesting that any piano student that didn't have a grand piano was a turnip. Or a baboon, I can't remember which.

We press on with the resources we have.

Perhaps you should qualify that by saying " some of the teachers you know...." It certainly doesn't necessarily apply to the teachers I know.

Regards,

Sarah, it's nice to hear from you. I somehow felt it would be Sunday again.

Since we help each other on the forum both ways, it would also be nice to have some of your ideas on the matter, so that it is not so much one -way.

One thing I'd be interested in reading your opinion on is the idea of physical technical development. The in-room part is not a matter of "smelling" the teacher but the whole thing of seeing all angles of the student's movements, and vice versa. Sometimes I touch conveys a lot, and that cannot happen. What are your thoughts on that part?


How is that possible? The student also needs to see and hear the teacher? Where there are also video libraries, and all you see is the teacher's hands from the wrist down, so much information is missing. The best I've seen in that extent is on the ArtistWorks platform, where you can get things like top view, side from angle view, close-up, pedal foot if needed. My work there has been on violin but I've seen excerpts on piano.

Can you explain in what kind of context the teacher's setup is less important? I'm not understanding.


Skype has really gone downhill. They "improved" it by getting rid of ambient noise, and decided that a sustained note was ambient noise. So your teacher is listening for your pedal timing, and Skype decides to make everything staccato. I've switched to Google Hangouts thanks to the kind suggestion of a fellow student here.

One community is found right here, where we share our collective knowledge and experience with each other. There are some fantastic folks here.

Google Hangouts.

Lessons also include sending video and audio files, because even the best programs tend to distort somewhat.

A laptop that has a USB monitor attached to it. The monitor sits on the piano, the laptop is beside it.

I advise friends of the pros and cons, advise them to look into their goals and purposes. The physical-technical side is still a problem,but poor or careless teaching locally is an even bigger problem. When all is said and done, the quality of the teacher is paramount.

Can you suggest what the purpose or benefits of that would be?

This forum hosts recitals of various kinds. Feel free to browse here and even partake some of the recitals. Perhaps someone here can provide some links. They're sort of awesome. (imho)

No surprises.


Nothing.


(1) wanted to have a teacher that would prepare me for Royal Conservatory of Music (RCM) grade-level exams and there were limited number in my geographic area, and (2) convenience, scheduling, and reducing commute time overhead to lessons.


Yes.


Highly recommend paid Zoom.us account set with (1) student account as sub account, (2) with "preserve original sound" option on, and (3) with automatic sound level adjustments turned off. Many other video messengers (Skype, etc.) are tuned for meetings and spoken voice and in order to reduce bandwidth, they compress away frequencies outside the voice range, which makes for very poor quality and glitches. Zoom.us with the above settings preserves the exact sound being recorded with no lossy compression of the audio during the transmission. I've been very impressed since starting to use it earlier this year.


See above. Also have a good high resolution webcam and microphone and good Internet bandwidth.


N/A. I did not have in-person lessons before.


Piano World.


(1) wanted to have a teacher that would prepare me for Royal Conservatory of Music (RCM) grade-level exams and there were limited number in my geographic area, and (2) convenience, scheduling, and reducing commute time overhead to lessons.


Zoom.us. See above. After trying several, I realize this may be one of the best for music lessons due to the ability to turn off lossy audio compression (explained above).


Shared Dropbox with teacher.


Yes


Washington DC, USA


No.


Yes.


Yes.


Piano World recorded quarterly online recital. Also will be participating in two of the monthly Piano Jams on the Reddit r/piano subreddit.

Also considering participating in the biweekly (recently, it's been weekly) online, but live, Discord Pinano Recitals:



Play for myself and my wife only.

Hi,

Answering the questions. I am new to posting regularly and lost the threads :-)

Concerning MusicTraveler in the Dublin, I will make inquiries and get back to you.

On being in the room: Where I was teaching before, physical contact between unrelated adult men and women was culturally inappropriate. I had to refine my language so I could demonstrate and describe without contact. When I have students who are motivated to improve technique, I often refer them to Fred Karpoff, whose videos are really good.

On the set-up of students: I (and many of my friends) teach in underserved areas of the world. Students who are desirous of lessons either may not be able to afford the perfect set-up, or the set-up may not be available in local markets. If I have a really strict policy concerning tech , those students wouldn't find other teachers locally. Additionally, with the AV quality, sometimes the issue isn't with the hardware, but the Internet Service Provider and governments. One can have really great equipment and still have poor quality sound because you can't control those two factors.

Of course, teachers can stipulate what set-ups they would prefer and not take students without specific equipment. Students can also select teachers who are accepting of what their potential students have.

On teachers wanting to teach online, I should have said, there are many teachers who want to teach online lessons. Of course, there are many who have no interest. With advances in internet technology, more and more teachers and students are connecting online.

Thanks for the responses.
Sarah

I think this was responding to one of my posts.

I was not thinking so much of physical contact, but what can be seen for guidance. I'm also not necessarily thinking about improving technique, but establishing some good first habits. Playing piano is not just a matter of knowing which piano keys to press down, how it should sound, and hopefully learning to read notes. How those notes are pressed down and the habits we establish, that might mess us up further down the line, matters. Personally I've had to relearn, which is harder than getting this right. If I am studying any instrument with a teacher on-line, in the very least I want to see the teacher, preferably more than from the wrist down.

Supposing I'm sitting too low, and you only see my hands, and I only see your hands. You might be able to guess how I'm sitting, because I may be arching my wrist to get high enough; if I'm constantly hunching my shoulders to get high enough, you won't see that. If I can see more of my teacher, I might be able to figure it out. That is why I wrote that in the least, how the teacher is set up camera-wise does make a difference, if it is at all possible. Interactive pianos that play the keys of your piano when the other person plays it (I saw that in one demo out there) feels gimicky in comparison.


I don't know if you saw what I wrote earlier on - I realize you had a lot of posts to go through. The arrangements I've had is to also send sound files and video files, to overcome this part.
- You can upload a video on a private setting to Youtube giving your teacher the link
- You can e-mail a video to your teacher, but this may get into bandwidth and other problems
- You can open a shared link on a cloud platform such as Dropbox, and place your videos there as mp3 files

- You can e-mail a sound file (again, it clutters up the teacher's computer space etc.) - mp3 is less heavy that mp4
- You can upload to SoundCloud which is a free service, and provide a link
- You can use the cloud idea again

I was extremely poor when I started because of some circumstances going on in my life at the time that I joined PW. In 2008 I borrowed some quarters and stood in the snow in a phone booth negotiating that my electricity wouldn't be cut off, because I had gotten some freelance work but wouldn't be paid for a month. I had Internet because my business depended on it. My first device was an iPad. My Logitech camera is cheaper than an iPhone and the stand is patched together from a guy who has his own business creating excellent put-together stand parts.


I'm thinking that it is good for students to know what the optimum setup might be, so they can work toward that to get close. This is not necessarily a matter of expensive equipment. In one of your blog articles you wrote about the child running to the other room to get a pencil, eating up lesson time. That pencil being there before lesson start is part of an optimum setup.

Thanks for the thoughtful response. I hear what you are saying about camera heights and set-ups. I think a lot of this depends on who your students are and what they are capable of doing from the beginning.

If the students are children, often the teachers are reliant about parental support to be able to set-up cameras, record things, file share and everything else. Not all parents are created equally in this regard, so the teacher is often to make decisions about how to spend lesson time. If a whole lesson is spent on technical stuff, and no piano is actually taught (not an uncommon occurrence, from what I have heard, talking to other teachers) both the teacher and student get frustrated.

Since I don't live where my students do, and sending them things like tripods and lighting is impractical, I have to live with what is there. It isn't ideal. I also have several students with severe anxiety. Sometimes they choose not to be visible.

Teachers who teach online start noticing things differently than they do in person. For example, I can see if the bench height is correct by the angle of their arms at the keyboard. You start developing a sense of what is right or not when you are exposed to different camera angles.

If someone has a digital piano, it can be connected to another digital piano using InternetMidi by Time Warp Technologies. This doesn't mimic the feel, but because MIDI files are small, they zip over the internet, and the sound is generated at the keyboard rather than at the student's piano and sent over Skype.

Getting the set-up right for both sides is a collaboration that both sides need to agree on in advance and when signing up new students should be considered. Sometimes it feels easier to get reluctant students to practice than reluctant parents to help get everything set-up correctly.

This is an adults forum, so perhaps the considerations of working with the parents of students here isn't applicable. It is often much easier to get my adults on board with the technical side of things.

I have often thought of creating guides to help teachers and students get set-up but tech keeps changing, and as I mentioned earlier, not everything is easily available in local markets.

What I am hearing from you is that teachers should be familiar with uploading various files to the cloud and youtube to supplement what they are teaching to help their students. Is this correct?

My adult students file share and send videos more often than my teens and younger ones.

Thanks again for your responses. I am working on the blog by the way, and flummoxed with the new technology, hopefully this is a temporary situation ;-)

I agree completely, students should have sharpened pencils by the piano, and whatever their device is, it should be charged.

Sarah

I had seen that and wondered what it is far. If it circumvents sound distortion, that is a clever solution.

Btw, when anyone sends a PM (private message) you will see a flashing envelope in the upper right hand corner by your name.