The Media Matrix:
Improving Arts Education at SCPS

By Lucy Appert, Ethan Ehrenberg, Gloria Rohmann & Robert Squillace

SCPS' new Media Matrix is a vital networking tool that links instructors and students to the wide range of resources available in Bobst Library, on the Web, and among our own faculty. Like many stories, that of the Media Matrix project began with a problem and a piece of luck. This robust online tool originated in the General Studies Program (GSP), a two-year, full-time day program in NYU's School of Continuing and Professional Studies (SCPS).

GSP students are freshmen and sophomores who, after completing the school's liberal arts curriculum, earn associate's degrees and transfer into one of NYU's seven other undergraduate colleges to complete their bachelor's degrees. The program requires all freshmen to take the two-course Cultural Foundations sequence, which offers an interdisciplinary introduction to the worlds of literature, art, and music. In the 2004-2005 academic year, the Cultural Foundations sequence has more than 20 instructors teaching approximately 850 students.

While each instructor chooses the literature he or she covers, a Program Committee has traditionally selected an art and music book to be used in common by all sections of the course. Agreement upon which book to adopt was always difficult to come by; indeed, in just the past five years, three art and two music texts were used. The last of these, a combined art/music text, proved the least adequate of the lot. So, in fall 2003, Dr. Heather Masri, Co-Director of Curriculum Development, constituted a Curriculum Committee to look into the options for dealing with this persistent issue. To explore technical approaches to the problem, SCPS instructors Dr. Lucy Appert and Dr. Robert Squillace were appointed as the Technology Sub-Committee.

When the Curriculum Committee began to meet, it soon became clear that the best art texts on the market specialized purely in the study of art, while the only music texts worthy of consideration failed to address the precise needs of GSP's musically inexperienced students and cost far too much. The problem seemed insoluble: a combined art/music text tended to short-shrift both art and music, but requiring a pricey text for each discipline was pedagogically and financially indefensible. Then, luck intervened.

The Birth of the Matrix

Drs. Appert and Squillace had been pursuing the idea of linking instructors to resources already publicly available on the Web, but soon concluded that the tendency of websites—even educational sites—to flicker in and out of existence made large scale reliance on such sources inadvisable. When they concluded that any web-delivered resources would have to be developed by GSP and located on an NYU server, Dr. Masri suggested that they speak with Ethan Ehrenberg, an Instructional Technology Specialist at the ITS Faculty Technology Center, about possible ways to use the Blackboard learning management system for this purpose.

At his initial meeting with Appert, Ehrenberg recollected that Gloria Rohmann, Head of Bobst Library's Avery Fisher Media Center, had previously worked with NYU's Music Librarian and Adjunct Instructor of Music, Kent Underwood, to create a course-specific site featuring web-delivered music from the Library's holdings. Squillace had participated in the pilot for the Library's E-Reserve system the previous spring and knew something of its potential; hearing Ehrenberg's description of Rohmann and Underwood's project raised for him and Appert the intriguing possibility of dispensing with a music text altogether.

Figure 1. The Media Matrix home page.

When the authors of this article met in December 2003, the framework for the Media Matrix rapidly took shape. Perhaps the need for a music text could be obviated by delivering a set of links, via Blackboard, to streaming music files in the E-Reserve system, and by accompanying these files with whatever sort of textual analysis was necessary.

Indeed, we could even insert links to entries in the Grove Music Online, a encyclopedic account of the history of music and musicians, accessible through the Library's links to online databases. Through an innovative use of Blackboard, the Media Matrix would create a shared content repository, or mini content management system, so that faculty could access and incorporate common material in their individual Blackboard course sites.(1)

Development & Implementation

While its underlying concept sprang to life quickly, the Matrix site still had considerable growing pains to endure before it would be ready for use. In spring 2004, Appert and Squillace tested the practicality of the basic concept in a pilot project. First, they selected musical compositions from the Avery Fisher collection, then Rohmann encoded them for streaming audio. Links to the streaming files, which reside in the Library's archives, were then posted with Ehrenberg's help on the Blackboard pages for Squillace and Appert's courses. The pilot proved an unmitigated success, with Appert, Squillace, Ehrenberg, and Rohmann, as well as Drs. Nancy Reale and Brian Culver of the Music Sub-Committee, all agreeing that the Matrix was superior to any available textbook.

Since that time, this article's four authors have concentrated on the technical aspects of developing the project for full-scale implementation, while Reale and Culver have focused on producing the textual analyses of music to be used by instructors. But a limited pilot project differs significantly from a full-scale teaching site for a course sequence with 35 sections each semester.

Figure 2. The Vernacular Song edit page within the Music Units tab.

Our first challenge in developing the production model of the Matrix involved basic site organization—how could we best confine access to the site so that the music posted on it would conform to the rules of the E-Reserve system, and at the same time give individual instructors the maximum flexibility in tailoring the material to their own courses? We quickly realized that making the Matrix site directly available to students would not work; no two instructors teach the same music in the same way, so the material we posted needed to pass through the mind of the instructor before it entered the ear of the student. We determined that the best solution was to limit access to the Matrix site to instructors; they could each then decide what to link to in their own individual Blackboard course sites.

Our solution created a fresh obstacle, however: since instructors would need to be able to copy folders from the Matrix site, how could we guard against the inadvertent deletion of our pain-stakingly assembled amalgams of links by less technically proficient faculty members? We realized that the best insurance was redundancy; not only did we build a great deal of repetition into the Matrix site (e.g., the same links to Medieval compositions might appear under both "Music Units" and "Build Your Own Music Module"), but we also created a duplicate of the entire site in a "Master Matrix" shell accessible only to the project team.

Further, we created a two-tiered system of musical coverage, compiling individual modules for every relevant genre (plainsong, organum, oratorio, and so forth) that contain a small number of musical examples and a great deal of textual support, as well as more extensive lists of related works for instructors to teach, should they wish. These examples greatly exceed the scope of any provided by the CDs that accompany music texts now on the market.

In order to complete folders for the classes we offer on the music of the Middle Ages in time for the Fall 2004 semester, we divided our labors to make the best use of our time. Appert took charge of the general site organization, determining the basic divisions of its content areas and the site's appearance, while also creating, in consultation with Ehrenberg and Rohmann, the site's non-musical areas. These areas offer toolboxes designed to maximize the site's potential in the hands of each instructor, and allow for the creation of groups of images to supplement the art text. Appert, with collaborative and editorial assistance from Squillace, also compiled an illustrated training manual for first-time users.

Figure 3. Links to external resources.

Squillace, meanwhile, took responsibility for developing themusical folders themselves, choosing the genres to be represented for each period and the individual compositions to be included, in consultation with Reale and Culver. He then arranged with Rohmann the encoding of CD tracks into streaming files and the posting of links to these files, in addition to integrating the substantial content generated by Culver and Reale into this new teaching system. Reale wrote a series of pieces on the basic elements of music, while Culver contributed listening charts for individual compositions. They also created brief introductions to the music of each period covered by the modules, to which Squillace and Appert added multimedia links.

The Media Matrix site has made such rapid progress primarily because we have not only included people with technological and humanities expertise in its creation, but we have also made it the specific responsibility of some Committee members to act as liaisons between the two worlds.

The Media Matrix in Action

The Media Matrix now delivers all of the necessary components for our basic fall 2004 music curriculum, which covers the Middle Ages and early Renaissance; in spring 2005, the site will include the Baroque, Classical, and Romantic periods. With the original listening files from Underwood's course and links to Grove Music Online as its basis, we have expanded the list of streaming files and added original teaching materials. These include listening charts, time-keyed guides through individual music selections; a teaching module on the basic Elements of Music; and supplemental materials such as images of medieval manuscripts and instruments. We have organized the material into chronological teaching modules covering the major musical periods from our courses.

Instructors now download modules from the Media Matrix to their own Blackboard sites and selectively assign material from them in their syllabi, in effect creating their own textbooks. Students access the material by logging onto Blackboard, printing out or downloading the assigned texts, and using them to guide their listening to the assigned music selections. Students can then bring the texts to class, where instructors will incorporate the material, including listening selections, into their teaching. Access to all copyrighted materials is strictly limited to instructors and students currently enrolled in the courses.

While the modules in themselves provide a complete curriculum, instructors can also customize them by adding or eliminating material, or they can create their own modules organized by composer, genre, form, or other category. To facilitate this practice, we have provided an extended list of alternate listening files and links to online textual resources such as Indiana University's online library of complete opera libretti and the online image collections from New York-area museums. Instructors are also encouraged to require their students to buy complete versions of longer works, such as symphonies or operas, through links to iTunes or other online music retailers, such as Amazon.

Figure 4. The Media Matrix student toolbox.

We are aware that for some instructors and students, the technical aspects of an online curriculum may seem daunting. To make the experience as easy and pleasant as possible, we have created faculty and student toolbox features that include system requirements, links to all of the necessary software downloads, and links to key library resources. The instructor's manual, available both in print and on the Matrix site, also walks instructors through the major functions of the site.

The Matrix project offers many advantages over conventional textbooks. For students, it has the potential to solve some of the issues associated with learning about music in a survey course. Files from the Elements module that explain basic music concepts (such as polyphony or rhythm) can be included within the chronological modules, where students must apply their knowledge of the basic concepts to more complicated works. For instructors, the Matrix site offers permanent discussion board forums that give our department a virtual file cabinet for sharing ideas and materials. Instructors and students benefit from becoming more familiar with the library's electronic media resources and gaining proficiency in navigating them.

Perhaps the most exciting aspect of this project is its potential as a tool in the investigation of interdisciplinary relationships. Music textbooks generally include a few titillating pages devoted to key artistic or literary trends that connect with specific musical periods. The Matrix modules enable instructors to pursue those connections more rigorously. Listening files can be presented alongside image and text files to aid students in making the kinds of connections our courses require.

All of these advantages stem from the fact that the Media Matrix exploits the flexibility of electronic media to recombine the same materials into a variety of different, but equally coherent, learning strands. For example, teaching a unit on women composers using a traditional music textbook would mean assembling a hodgepodge of reading and listening assignments, probably spread throughout the textbook—or several different ones—and supplemented with lots of handouts and listening tracks from the instructor's private music library. The Matrix simplifies the assembly of such a unit and allows instructors to create a sustained narrative that promotes comparison both within the unit itself and with other units. This flexibility reflects the reality of our department, where specialists in different areas (literature, art, music) approach the subject matter differently and tailor it to fit their teaching styles.

Figure 5. The faculty discussion board.

Training and Support

We understand that the success and positive reception of the Media Matrix will depend to a great degree on the faculty's ability to use this resource and to incorporate it in an easy and intuitive way into their current work process. We therefore decided to launch the project with the first of perhaps many hands-on training sessions in June 2004 and early in the Fall 2004 semester, and we hope to supplement them with occasional faculty brown-bag seminars on Blackboard and Library resources.

After an initial roll-out phase over the coming academic year, we plan to evaluate the site's progress with a survey of the faculty who have used it. We look forward to reporting next year on the project's reception and, we hope, growth. For more information about the Media Matrix, send e-mail to Robert Squillace (rs84@nyu.edu), Lucy Appert (lga2@nyu.edu), Ethan Ehrenberg (ethan.ehrenberg@nyu.edu), or Gloria Rohmann (gloria.rohmann@nyu.edu).

For more information about Blackboard, see What's New with NYU Blackboard? in this issue.

Footnote

Author Biography

Lucy Appert is an adjunct assistant professor in the SCPS General Studies Program; Ethan Ehrenberg is an Instructional Technology Specialist and Blackboard Support Specialist at the ITS Faculty Technology Center; Gloria Rohmann, an early user of streaming media at NYU, is Head of Electronic and Media Services at NYU Libraries; Robert Squillace has taught Cultural Foundations in the SCPS General Studies Program since 1998.