Theory teachers!

This semester I've been making a concerted effort towards a paperless classroom. This is relatively easy in graduate classes that require mostly written assignments and projects. Our school requires that all incoming undergraduate music students purchase Sibelius, so composition assignments are also quite easily submitted online. My struggle has been with analytical assignments for undergraduates. I'm finding it quite difficult to get away from having them annotate scores and draw diagrams. Doing so in a digital format is quite cumbersome. The least irritating option is still not great: having them print, annotate, scan, and send by email is still too many steps.

Do any of you use online analysis assignments?

I do not. FYI, I teach Theory 3, an upper-level counterpoint class, and a grad seminar right now.

We SOM faculty are prohibited from photocopying—a budgetary decision—but since students get 20 free printed pages per day, I ask my Theory 3 people to print a PDF of whatever the assignment is and hand things in that way. (Hate having to do this: few of them can double-side their pages, and none of them appear to own staplers!) The other classes can submit assignments electronically, but Theory 3 has 65 kids and about 4 hours of usable TA help...

Nonetheless, it's also very important to me that they can properly notate by hand, so I guess that's something.

I center my analysis and composition around thoroughbass lines (for classical stuff, anyway). Any harmonic analyses they turn in for an assessment tend to be thoroughbass reductions with various analytical symbols. It's a lot easier to do that electronically than a whole score. PDF annotations might help, though, if students have PDF viewers that allow text annotations.

For form analysis, Variations Audio Timeliner is both a great pedagogical tool (especially for teaching formal analysis by ear) and an easy file format for online submissn, if all students use the same audio file.

I've had students write analyses in blog posts, but they are not all comfortable adding graphics (score snippets or the like). I've also had students submit PDFs of scanned analyses using DropBox or Moodle (I hated Blackboard when we used it, but Moodle is good).

Be careful about Sibelius, given its questionable support state.

Thanks, folks! Kris: I really like the thoroughbass idea, as it shows their ability to reduce surface material to an outline of the basic harmonic rhythm -- something that students tend to struggle with and thus a worthwhile endeavor on its own!

Re: Sibelius. Yeah, I'm not sure how much longer we'll be a "Sibelius school." Frankly, I was shocked to hear of the requirement, given the expense, but I guess not many have complained. I'm new here, so I just went along with it.