Elearning online has come a long way by providing eager learners and educators with elearning development tools, programs, applications and courses that encompass all the major fields and careers known today. Recently, there is a particular field that’s slowly making its presence known in the industry and it is music education. Music enthusiasts are the overlooked target market; but fortunately, they can now enjoy the many benefits of electronic learning.

Music programs have always been underestimated as solid school subjects. In most educational institutions and universities, music is more often considered as an extra curricular activity or simply an elective subject. This downplays its importance in the curriculum, making it the likely option to be dropped in case of budget cuts, which is rampant due to the poor economic landscape.

If a person cannot enroll in a certain class for Ancient Civilization, for example, it would not be difficult for him or her to look up an available online course for the subject and simply take it there.

However, the same cannot be said for music. For the last few years, the presence of music education online has been practically nonexistent. Many factors contributed to its unavailability. The biggest one is probably due to the lack of available technology to support its delivery. Since music encompasses auditory, visual and tactile learning and teaching, it was difficult to create such a course because there weren’t elearning development tools that were powerful enough to support the endeavor. But now, the advancements of technology has brought about a flux of new applications, programs, software and even hardware that can make music education a huge success in the industry.

Here are some examples of the best elearning development tools that are relevant to the delivery and creation of online music education courses:

• Skype – One of the newest communication tools, this useful PC application provides a wide array of services at absolutely no cost.

Aside from your usual instant messaging, it allows you to listen to voice simultaneously with IM, play games, send file, share links, use screen share, and make video calls, which is the best feature of all. Instructors can effectively teach students using this because it offers visual and auditory learning. Tactile learning comes in when students are able to return demonstrate what they see their teachers are doing in real time. It mimics real life minus your typical inconveniences such as schedule conflict.

• Moodle – Moodle or Modular Object Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment is an open-source learning management system. It allows educators to create online courses that are concise, relevant and engaging. It is effective for music students to collaborate on various works through forums and wikispaces. Furthermore, it is an online application that gives users the opportunity to take quality exams as per design of their instructors. Through this innovation, educators can provide learners with a setup that mimics a traditional learning classroom which a makes use of discussions, activities, lessons and so on.

There are other resources online that can help supplement music elearning. Unfortunately, these developments are still in their beginning stages, and availability is still limited at best. Give or take a few years, there will be better courses online to address the demands of the numerous musicians out there.

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