Basic Instrument Care and Maintenance for Beginners

This self-paced series of eLearning modules were designed and developed to help beginning woodwind and brass instrumentalists better understand how to care for and maintain their instruments.

Audience: Beginning band students who are learning to play instruments belonging to the brass or woodwind families

Responsibilities: Analysis, Instructional Design, eLearning Development, Visual Design, Course Implementation, Course Evaluation

Tools Used: Google Workspace Applications, Final Cut Pro

Experience the Project

Overview

For this project, I partnered with a local band instrument repair shop to create a series of instructional modules designed to help beginning band students learn how to properly maintain and care for their instruments. In the owner's experience, a lack of knowledge of basic instrument care and handling best practices leads to a majority of the damage that he sees to younger student's instruments.

While some number of accidents are to be expected, the financial burden of repairs that could have been avoided can sometimes be too much for families to cover. This financial burden can often lead to students trying to play on instruments that do not function properly, which can lead to their giving up trying to play the instrument all together, or in some rare cases instruments being abandoned at the repair shop costing the business time and money.

Through a combination of phone interviews and some direct observation in the repair shop, it was clear that the situation would benefit from some form of intervention. Similar to how we teach children to brush their teeth so that they don't get cavities, the same approach of teaching preventative care so that students avoid needing repairs in the first place felt appropriate. Avoiding damage all together would not only save the families money but ultimately keep the instrument in the students hands so that they can continue to learn without interruption.

After some discussion as to who our target learners would be and various forms the instruction could take, we landed on a series of modules that would use video content as the mode of instruction supported by instructional review games. The course would conclude with the students creating their own job aid or cheat sheet that they can print off and store in their instrument case covering the most essential information from the course so that it can be easily referenced any time the student uses their instrument.

As this course was intended for beginners, the goals we set included some basic knowledge of band instruments, some specifics of their component parts, and basic care and maintenance. The three goals are as follows:

Students will be able to identify and distinguish between instruments belonging to the brass family and the woodwind family.
Students will learn to identify and name the various parts of their instruments.
Students will be able to recall the procedures of basic care and maintenance of their own instruments.

Design Process

Guided by the ADDIE model, having had the opportunity to analyze the current situation and decide upon our instructional goals and basic features, I set to work designing the instruction. I began by wire framing how students would proceed through each module. With the technical framework in place, I created a rough storyboard that included the topics to be covered in each module laid out how they would appear on the webpage and what type of media or activity they would be. Next I moved onto storyboarding and scripting the videos that were to be used as the main mode of instruction. While creating the storyboards for each video, iterations of visual design elements were completed to ensure that each of the videos had a uniform look and feel. Finally an interactive prototype was created that showcased one of the modules.

Wire Framing and Layout

The wireframe for the instruction acted as the backbone of the project going forward. Knowing from the beginning that video instruction was going to be a major component of the course, I wanted to make sure that the modules did not turn into lectures by providing opportunities for the learners to practice and demonstrate their knowledge in some form in each module. Specific effort was made to keep the length of the videos as brief as possible by splitting up larger topics into smaller chunks. Splitting up content had the added benefit of allowing the instruction to be tailor fit to the individual learner where possible. With the wireframe in place the modules and their specific content were sketched out as mock web pages. Indications of types of media to be used and specific functionality such as navigational elements were visualized to map out how learners would move through the course from start to finish.

Storyboarding and Scripting

At this point in the project the client, who was also acting as the Subject Matter Expert (SME), had clarified what topics needed to be covered in each module. This proved to be very important at this stage of design as there were several topics that were going to be addressed in multiple modules. Each module was designed to build upon each other. Terminology and practices introduced in one module would be used, elaborated on, and referenced in later modules. This was done as a way to help ease the learners into what is admittedly a rather technical topic by not providing them with too much information at one time and taking advantage of repetition to assist with retention of the most important points and concepts covered. Keeping the overall picture in mind, each video was storyboarded and scripted noting when certain topics were discussed and to what extent.

Interactive Prototype

Before moving to full development, an interactive prototype of the course was created. The course was to be built from a Google site. Using the layout that the client and I agreed on, I set up a functional portion of the site focused on a single module. Setting up the rest of the site with place holder graphics and information allowed the client to get a feel for how everything would look and function before we committed any more time or energy to any design decisions. After making some modifications based on their feedback, I got the go head to move onto full development.

Full Development

As I had already designed and laid out each module, as well as scripted and storyboarded the instructional videos to be used, the only thing left to do was pick a direction to start working. I opted to start on the video production as I knew that it would likely take the longest to complete and if any changes were made they would ripple out into the rest of the project.

I am very glad that I started with video production because my worries became very real. I have experience as a band instrument repair technician and in an effort to lighten the load on my SME decided that I would act as the presenter in most of the video content. By assigning myself the role of talent in addition to my other responsibilities, I was now directly involved or responsible for every aspect of the production of the videos. Saying I learned a lot feels like a bit of an understatement in hindsight. I learned quickly what parts of my original plans would need revising and throughout the process I could recognize the amount of time and effort I was saving myself by being willing to embrace better techniques and practices.

Once my wording was made permanent in the videos, I moved onto creating my assessments and review activities. I decided to complete these steps in tandem as they had quite a bit of overlap. As I was already using Google sites to host the instruction, I opted to use Google Forms for the assessments at the end of each module. The tool that I used to create the interactive review activities was wordwall.net . I knew from the beginning of the project that I wanted to find a way to include gamification into the project. Specifically I was looking for something that was more involved than simply clicking buttons. Wordwall.net provided a perfect solution for my needs. The service offers a variety of types of review games that you can choose from and some of those games require the learner to drag objects around the screen or manipulate various elements. In addition to tracking high scores or times, this site proved to be a excellent fit for my younger learners. In the interviews I conducted with learners following the instruction, the review games were a clear favorite.

The final assignment of the course requires the learners to demonstrate what they have learned in the form of completing their own job aid or cheat sheet. Consolidating the most important information covered during the instruction onto a single page proved to be an interesting challenge. After a conversation with the SME about the cheat sheet, we were able to zero in on the information that they felt would be the most useful to have reminders of immediately on hand. To ensure that the cheat sheet was as relevant as possible, 10 instrument specific cheat sheets were made so that the information provided was as relevant as possible to each individual learner.

Results and Takeaways

Results

Generally speaking, I found the instruction to be a success. After completing the instruction, the learners participated in an exit interview. Ultimately, a mixture of younger and older learners were selected to test the instruction. The instruction was designed to target younger learners but the client pointed out that the information may also be useful for the parents or guardians of students to know as well. It would be unrealistic to expect younger students to place appointments for themselves even if they were told they needed to. That level of planning would need adult assistance.

My adult learners found the course easy to manage and enjoyed learning about how to take care of instruments. Several of the adults that participated in the testing have a musical background but still left stating that they learned something they did not know before. My younger participants shared similar thoughts about finding the information helpful. However, it would appear that some of the content confused them at first and ran a little long. I was concerned that something like this would occur, but their results do show that they met the performance goals for the most part.

Our first instructional goal was that learners would be able to identify and distinguish between instruments belonging to the brass family and the woodwind family. They would show this by scoring a 75% or higher on their module one quiz. Shown in Fig. 1, all participants scored a 100% on this quiz.

The second goal was that learners would be able to identify and name the various parts of their instruments. They would show this by successfully identifying all parts of their instrument on a diagram within two attempts. Most students accomplished this task on the first attempt, however, some did need to make a few corrections. All learners did correctly identify all parts by their second attempt as can be seen in Fig. 2.

The third instructional goal was that learners would be able to recall the procedures of basic care and maintenance of their own instruments. They would show this by scoring a 75% or higher on their module three quiz. This was a harder quiz due to the technicality and amount of the information the learners had to remember. This is the first place where a clear split occurs in the scores of the two age ranges. The older group all scored 100% on their quizzes while many of the younger learners scored between 50% and 75%. This score break down is shown in Fig. 3. There were some 100% submissions but at this point the learners were halfway through the course and it would appear that a number of factors likely contributed to their lower scores compared to previous assignments.

As I conducted the exit interviews, I made note that I felt as though the younger learners that participated will be much more prepared to start learning to play their instruments than their peers in the fall. As an elementary music teacher at the time, I can say that this information is not something that they would have received on my end prior to getting their instruments.

Takeaways

If I were to complete this project again there are a few areas that I would like to improve upon. The first improvement would be to include a band director as a stake holder in the project. The instruction as it is now will be presented to the learners from the folks at the repair shop. Unless Mr. Ray decides to share this instruction with the schools he services, there is a good chance that the students it is designed to help will only see it after there is a problem with their instruments. By working in coordination with a school specifically, the instruction could be tailored in a way the information can be made more readily available to potential learners and be formatted in a way that a band director could incorporate it into their general instruction.

A second recommendation regards the quizzes that are used to evaluate the learners using Google forms. Google forms worked nicely for me as the person facilitating the instruction because I could easily take the submitted answers and start analyzing the data in a spreadsheet. A draw back to this format is that once the learner completed their quiz, they did not get immediate feedback on how they did. To deal with this issue I created answer key videos going over the answers to the questions generally. While I am fairly confident that my testers were not cheating during their quizzes, having the answers to the quiz so easily accessible would make cheating quite easy and undetectable on my end. If I were to use quizzes as a means of evaluating student understanding in the future, I would like to use a tool that gives the learner immediate feedback on their responses after each response. They would get feedback not only telling them what the correct answer is but would get feedback on the any incorrect answers they chose as well so that they are learning or reviewing each time the select a wrong answer. This style of quiz would give me the facilitator the same amount of data with additional security as well as do much more to help the learners learn the content.

In closing, it is my hope that this instruction will be used to help more students in the future. This information can prove to be very valuable to a young musician but it appears that it is being overlooked due to time limitations or pressures on teachers in the classroom to cover other material. If this can help even a single family to avoid unnecessary damages to their instrument, I feel that Mr. Ray and I can count this as a job well done.