The Blair School of Music will offer its first MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) earl
y in 2016: “Understanding the Music Business: What is Music Worth,” taught by Assistant Professor of Musicology Jen Gunderman and offered through the Coursera platform.
With the help of the Vanderbilt Institute for Digital Learning, Gunderman recently filmed segments of the course on location at Middle Tennessee State University, where Greg Reish of the Center for Popular Music created a cylinder recording for the class, and the studio of Nashville producer Dave Coleman, where Gunderman recorded a song written to highlight themes in the course. (Read more about these visits here and here.)
Drawing from her extensive experience as a recording artist and touring musician, Gunderman is building the course in order to challenge misconceptions about the music industry. The goal of the course is to “outline the basic structure and mechanisms of today’s music industry and encourage students to think critically and entrepreneurially about the future of music.”
For more on the course and Gunderman’s guiding philosophy, see this story in the Nashville Ledger.