Project Director: Victoria Malawey, Music
Part of our 2022/2023 DLA Faculty Fellows Cohort

Link to Multimodal Musicianship book

My aim is to create an open educational resource, with the working title “Multimodal Musicianship.” This resource will make available the materials I have developed over the past 20 years from my work in teaching music theory and ear training online to anyone who has internet access. Although the primary audience will be undergraduates at liberal arts colleges, my hope is that the resource will be widely accessible and available to all, using a creative commons open license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0), as I believe strongly in the universal right to knowledge and content. Up until now, my content has been fairly proprietary, and this project will allow me to share my learning content much more broadly. Furthermore, the resource will be a single-stream, easy-to-navigate platform that will allow me to better serve my students at Macalester. Beyond these immediate benefits, I hope my project can inspire other instructors at Macalester who may be curious about developing their own open educational resources to serve our students better and at no additional cost to them.

This collection of materials will offer multiple modes of engaging content—with text, musical examples, audio examples, video content, application activities, and links to supplemental content—designed for students to learn and reinforce their knowledge through different modes of engagement depending on their learning styles and needs. I have constructed these materials with principles of Universal Design for Learning in order to provide all students equal opportunity to learn content. In addition to presenting key concepts related to music theory, this educational resource also incorporates ear training activities, including pitch pattern identification, sight singing with movable-do solfege, aural meter identification, rhythmic dictation, tonal melodic dictation, harmonic dictation, and contextual listening.