Much like the MOOC platforms built by Udacity, Coursera, and edX, Kadenze also hopes to appeal to life-long learners and students who want to augment their career studies with arts education.
To that end, Kadenze is offering a two-tier enrollment structure. Anyone can audit the courses for free but will be unable to submit work for assessment. For a $7 per month membership fee, however, students can participate fully in as many Kadenze courses as they wish and receive official verification for all courses they complete.
Many of the arts courses offered through the Kadenze platform, such as Machine Learning for Musicians and Artists, have a technological underpinning that may be suited to an online environment. “Creating creative engineers is a really big push in our catalog,” explained Kapur. “We have a number of courses that teach students how to program while building a piece of artwork or building a piece of music. We can also do business classes successfully online, so we have a number of classes involving entrepreneurship, careers in media technology, and project management for designers.”
While MOOCs have struggled with low completion rates, Kadenze’s creators hope its niche appeal will attract enrollees with more staying power. “The digital media and creative technology community is small, but everybody is passionate about it,” said Jay LeBoeuf, a lecturer at Stanford who will be teaching a Careers in Digital Media course. “I would expect the completion rate to be higher than if we had done this on another MOOC platform where I might have a bunch of students who sign up just because the title sounds interesting.”
The three Ps
LeBoeuf agreed to teach a course on Kadenze for reasons that he calls the three Ps: platform, production, and people. The learning platform was built specifically to support an arts-oriented curriculum and creative technologies, with an emphasis on group collaboration, peer and algorithm-based assessment, and high production values.
For example, each course has a way for students to share their artwork via a gallery, where students can display image files, films, and videos. In addition, the platform has a built-in music player.
“What really stood out to me was the ability to have community and collaboration,” said LeBoeuf. “I really want to mentor the students, not just present information to them—I could put up YouTube videos if that was the only goal. The aim is to have a really immersive environment where students are asking questions in the forum and submitting their assignments. That way, students can make comments on those assignments and see how other students are thinking.”
Peer assessment plays an important role in the courses, as it does at other MOOC sites, but Kadenze also features some algorithm-based assessment tools that were custom built for arts education. “A student can submit a piece of music, for example, and our software is able to actually listen to the music and provide feedback,” said Kapur, whose PhD focused on building robots that play with musicians on stage.
Kadenze also aims to differentiate itself from its MOOC cousins via LeBoeuf’s two other Ps—production and people. The company employs a full production team of instructional designers—filmmakers, animators, and creative writers—to help create the courses for the participating institutions.
“The production is exceptionally high quality, and our footage looks like a million dollars,” said LeBoeuf, who believes the high production values will appeal to the millennial generation. “The content is engaging, uses multiple camera angles, and it’s snappy.”
While Kapur wants Kadenze to walk before it runs, he is closely following the trend among universities—particularly public schools—to pare back their arts offerings in favor of STEM and career-path degrees. In the long run, he sees an opportunity to provide budget-constrained schools with a turnkey arts solution that will give their students a more complete education.
“How can we supplement these big schools that are cutting these types of courses?” asked Kapur. “That’s the next step. We’re hoping that we can say, ‘Here’s your catalog, go for it.’
Andrew Barbour is a contributing editor with eCampus News.
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