Music History Revisited:
A Collection of Online Tests for the Undergraduate



Mellon Technology Fellows Proposal for Summer, 1999
to the Associated Colleges of the South

Patricia Gray, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Music
Rhodes College

May 10, 1998

Goal:

In a recent article entitled "Implementing a Scaleable and Sustainable Model for Instructional Software Development," by Gerard L. Hanley, Chuck Schneebeck, and Lou Zweier in Syllabus (May 1998), the authors point out that most technology development by faculty members has been confined to one course taught at one educational institution.

Innovative examples of high-quality instructional software applications exist at institutions of higher education across the country. Yet it is rare that these projects find their way into learning and teaching environments beyond the original author's classes. In fact, it is not unusual for considerable resources to be expended to develop software that serves a small number of people on a once-a-year basis.

The time and ingenuity required to create new technology application for use in the classroom deserves wider appreciation and reward. The goal of this proposal is the creation of a series of extensive exercises in the field of music history. These can be used by students to review for comprehensive undergraduate exams, the Graduate Record Examinations, and graduate school placement tests. These reviews can be used by any student anywhere with Internet access.

Proposal:
Until recently, implanting multimedia projects into web pages has been somewhat tedious requiring the student to download and install players and plug-ins or to launch separate applications. Obviously, these projects were platform specific, requiring both Mac and PC versions if they were to be widely used over the web. However, with the appearance of JavaScript, interactive project can be incorporated into simple HTML documents without the use of separate applications.

In the 1997-98 academic year I created review quizzes for each of the chapters in Grout's History of Western Music, the standard text for undergraduate music history survey courses. Before beginning this project I did an extensive Internet search to determine if products of this kind already existed. I found helpful models of Javascript quizzes but none in the area of music history. I then designed quizzes to contain the following:

• approximately 20 multiple choice or true/false questions taken from each chapter of the text
• hints in case of a wrong answer
• a running total of the number of correct answers

Students were required to use these reviews as part of the preparation for traditional classroom exams. These quizzes were available on the class home page located under Music 228 Quizzes on the European Music Heritage Page at:

http://gray.music.rhodes.edu/musichtmls/MH.html

Students' reception of these quizzes was very positive. The following remarks come from the class evaluations:

"I particularly liked the use of the quizzes online. They are an excellent study aid."
"The computers have helped things A LOT. Things are very easy to access."
"The quizzes kept me on my toes."

This proposal builds on this idea by creating ten large, comprehensive exercises that are not confined to one chapter in the text but cut across all areas of music history in the same way as the Graduation Record Examinations. These will encourage students to develop a more comprehensive approach to the material. The new quizzes will have all the features of the existing ones but will also add:

• a grade sheet that shows their answer and the correct answer
• more extensive use of photographs, musical scores, and sound
• more general approach not directly linked to a single textbook

Application at Other Institutions

The most important feature of this proposal is the ease with which it can be used and adapted by any institution on the Internet. If that institution is already running a web server these projects can be adapted with no expense at all. All that is required is a server and a word processing program. The process of adapting the projects to a particular institution consists of the following steps:

• open the Rhodes project using any browser
• download the page source code
• make desire changes (if any) in the code
• run on the new web server

The original code can be used as a template for new quizzes so that a thorough knowledge of JavaScript is not necessary.

These original ten units also have the possibility of becoming an ongoing project to which music history professors from all ACS institutions can contribute. Another possibility is the addition of exercises created by students. Once again, the universal free access to the use of JavaScript makes this very easy to accomplish technically.

Schedule:
The project will be completed by July 1999 so it will be available for use during the 1999-2000 academic year. Students in ACS institutions will be asked to provide written evaluations at the end of the first semester. Questionnaires will be sent to all music history professors whose students use the tests.

Budget:
The project can be created on the music department web server at Rhodes College. It does not require the purchase of any additional software. The only expense is the $2500 stipend to the author.

Patricia Gray
gray@rhodes.edu