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How does online music inquiry work?

9 June, 2015 - 15:31
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In general, learner-centered teaching methods are more challenging to organize than teacher-centered ones. However, because inquiry is so dependent on the availability of multiple sources of information, the Internet should make inquiry-based learning much more feasible than it has been in the past. In fact, there is so much information openly available online that many learners might be able to conduct useful inquiries with very little assistance, perhaps just a bit of structure and guidance in how to find useful resources and organize an inquiry.

Inquiry is closely related to the everyday skill of finding the answers to immediate questions, but formal inquiry takes a more long-range, "educative" perspective. It benefits from taking advantage of what educators know about how people learn and about the knowledge that is available in the various subject-area disciplines. For example, someone with a practical engineering problem may not realize that a particular type of math would be extremely useful in solving the problem. A beginning musician may have a clear long-term goal of writing songs for her rock band, but no clear idea how to learn what she needs to know in order to do that. In both cases, some structure and guidance could help the learner create a connection - an educational path - between their own project and "what people know" about engineering or music.