Considered one of the oldest in the nation, DePauw's School of Music has educated leaders in orchestration, composition, administration, and education.  Dr. Matthew Balensuela, Associate Director of Music, realized that on the DePauw University School of Music Website, there was no information about non-major music classes.  Classes often taught by Dr. Balensuela include Music Theory and Appreciation for Non-Majors. Through the use of technology, Dr. Balensuela has been able to create a tool to determine the musical level of incoming non-majors.

Balensuela explained his problem:

 “The project is based upon problems we’re having in the Fundamentals of Music class.  Fundamentals of Music is for non-(music)-majors … but it begins with (lessons on) how to read music notation.  A lot of students know how to read music already:  they know the names of the notes and many of those things, so for 80 to 90% of the class, the first two weeks are a blow-off.  For some students, it’s brand new, and the rest of the class separates real quickly. 

We thought technology would help us with it.  We’ve developed a small, multiple choice exam on Blackboard, and the theory of this is that students sign up for the class, then we make sure we can see their transcript to see if they’ve had some music classes, such as choir or dance or piano background.  If they’re not sure, they can take this online quiz, and it could track them into the right class.  This would be similar to the language quizzes:  if you’ve had so many years of French, then you can’t take rudimentary French and get a good grade."

With the help of Lynda LaRoche and the students and staff of FITS/mitc, Dr. Balensuela was able to create an online testing website during the 2004 FITS Summer Workshop.  Balensuela used Blackboard, a web-based program in which faculty members can distribute resources to students, to create an online exam. Two primary software programs, Finale 2004 and Dreamweaver, were used to develop the project.

The goal of the project was to create an online placement test that could be accessed by any student interested in taking a non-major music course. This allowed Dr. Balensuela to develop two classes at different levels – a class designed for students with beginning level music abilities, and a class for students with advanced knowledge in music:

“We’d like to develop something where we have two types of non-major music classes:  one with an introduction to music notation and the rudiments of the class, how to perform the notation.  That involves more clapping, and singing, and learning how to perform music notation.  There’s a little bit of terminology that goes along with it.  The second class that talks about scales and structure as an introduction to music theory:  how do you compose a song, how does a song come together, but with less emphasis on performance and more on structure.  …”