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Re: In Person vs. Online vs. Video Lessons

Author: kdk ★2017
Date: 2018-10-01 18:52

The jury is out, I guess, regarding Skype lessons. IMO, the sound quality isn't good enough to allow reliable teacher's assessments of the student's playing. But I know it has become a popular substitute for in-person private lessons, and I have to assume some of my negativity about it is simply prejudice.

As to video tutorials, I think they *can* be useful to a player who already has an established technique and approach to playing. But for students whose experience is very limited, the most valuable part of a teaching-learning process isn't seeing what to do, it's having the instructor's feedback to the student's attempt to follow the instructions. And for that to happen, the teacher needs feedback about the student's success at applying the instructions. There is zero feedback in either direction possible, and the student is left to rely on his or her own weak understanding of the problems involved. Once an instruction from the video has been tried, the inexperienced player has no really valid way of telling if the result is good or not. Much confusion can result from misinterpreting a video demonstration, or choosing the wrong solution out of the many possible ones available by watching videos by different instructors each focusing on different generic problems (and none of them on the individual student's specific complex of problems). That can be frustrating for the student. The teacher has no opportunity to find out if *a particular viewer* understood and applied the information in the video correctly.

If someone is looking for validation of his own discoveries or to find pieces of puzzles he has not entirely been able to solve for himself, he may find ideas to consider in video lessons. IMO a beginner or near beginner who tries to learn how to play the clarinet (or anything else) from scratch using video tutorials is doing himself a great disservice.

Karl

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