What comes to corona virus and its consequences in Finland everything happened so fast. In early March we still thought we are far from epidemic and mostly it was about washing hands more often and more carefully. But around mid-March everything changed and our goverment acted fast and quite strongly: all bigger happenings like concerts were banned, social distancing was highly recommended, schools closed, people were adviced to work remotely if possible etc. Personally I believe this was a wise strategy from our government: so far the epidemic has evolved quite slowly and our country has had time to prepare for a stronger disease peak.
For music teachers like myself we had SO little to time prepare to start teaching remotely. It was practically one weekend. Still on Friday (13th!) I had absolutely Zero experience on remote teaching and right next week I had to serve all my students. To my luck I already had quite a lot gear which was perfect for that. To me it almost seemed that I have strangely prepared myself to this condition without knowing it. Suddenly many of those purchases, which I earlier thought as unfortunate mistake, were lifesaver to me. This included Zoom-camera, Led-light, condenser mics and many kind of stands and holders. Also many years of study of digital tools and skills like Finale notation, PDF-tools, audio/video recording and editing had suddenly a great value.
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| My teaching studio under corona quarantine |
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| Audio Settings: enabling "Original Sound" and disabling audio processing for better audio quality |
In zoom you can also use your audio interface as a "microphone" source and this takes in sum of all inputs. In my MOTU-setup this was good news because this way I could easily mix my e-piano straight from stereo line inputs and take my voice with mic. I also put a second camera, Zoom Q2n-4k, above my keys. (Btw I believe this Zoom has nothing to do with zoom web conferencing. Correct me if I am wrong.)
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| Zoom Audio Settings: choosing my MOTU-audio interface as my input ("mic") and output ("speaker") |
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| Mic and second camera, Zoom Q2n-4k |
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| Piano teaching setup with Mac, Nord Grand and Genelec speakers |
To sum it, in my own case transition to remote teaching went surprisingly smoothly in general. Now after 4 weeks of teaching it feels already natural and I have managed to make kind of a system how to do it. This system means using all these tools but also way of delivering and receiving information - digital sheets, instructions, small videos and audio files etc. - and keeping diary. Alongside with zoom I decided to use WhatsApp for communication and materials, which seems to be very good for that and is also widely used among young and older generations.
Besides the most obvious downside - lacking normal teacher-student (close) contact, the main problem is still with immediate data transfer (meaning decent live audio & video). Most of the time it's quite ok but every now and then there are problems. Audio quality isn't always good from students' phones mics which makes it occasionally difficult to give precise feedback to their playing. Therefore I have advised them to record their playing as much as possible and send this better quality recording to me before next session. It's not a bad thing if students start to record their playing more often and learn to critically listen to themselves as well!
In general all this has been a major "digital leap" as they say. When the time comes to finally close this quarantine and go back to normal teaching mode, there are still so many good things keep doing this way!
Greetings from Turku and keep safe!
