EducaMus, an online platform for musical learning

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The platform has active courses such as EducaMus Profes, offered as training, and EducaMus Estudiantes, aimed at students of Pedagogy majors.

Currently, music education is included as a mandatory curricular discipline in Chile's primary school system. You are assigned up to two pedagogical hours of class per week. Of the teachers who teach it, only 2,25% have musical training (Ministry of Education of Chile (2015). The rest have the obligation to teach the subject, but they lack the didactic and musical skills necessary to do so. These skills They should be developed during their initial training period.

educamus2Despite this evident need, several studies show that the majority of Chilean universities do not take into account basic musical education in the curricula of pedagogical careers. On the other hand, full-time teachers dedicate more than 40 hours a week to their work, making it very difficult to attend in-person continuing training courses. Continuing training centers (CPEIP) do not offer continuing musical training courses and there are not many private offerings of this type of courses either. As if that were not enough, the supporters of educational centers do not generally have a proactive attitude towards the continuous training of their teachers, not recognizing the hours of training in their work day. Finally, in the new teaching career, the updating needs of teachers are added obligations for them and directly affect their performance.

In order to collaborate in the improvement of this training, EducaMus has been designed, an online platform hosted on the Digital Campus of the University of La Serena and designed to host massive online courses. These courses are dedicated to initial and continuous training of the teachers of our country, both in Basic General Education and in Kindergarten Education. Specifically, the active courses within the platform are EducaMus Profes (offered as a training course) and EducaMus Estudiantes (offered for students of Pedagogy majors). The advantage of these courses is that the user sings using the computer microphone and the software evaluates their intonation. Also, the user hits rhythms using computer keys, with the program associated with the course in charge of evaluating its rhythmic accuracy.  

The EducaMus courses have been carried out within the framework of the “Digital Platforms for Artistic Education” project, financed by Conicyt through the Advanced Human Capital Attraction Program. Its director is Dr. Mario Arenas, from the Department. of Music from the ULS, and the guest researcher is Dr. Jesús Tejada, from the U. of Valencia.