Rena Upitis and project partners awarded contract to develop electronic portfolio for music education

Angela Ester (The Royal Conservatory), Rena Upitis (Queen's University) & Philip Abrami (Concordia University) have been awarded a one-year contract with Canadian Heritage ($757,000) for their project entitled Enhancing Music Teaching and Learning Through a Web-based Portfolio.

This project will enable educators across Canada to revolutionize the way that students learn to play musical instruments, by providing music teachers with a powerful, freely available online multimedia environment designed specifically for students living in the digital age.

The bilingual electronic portfolio, ePEARL (developed at Concordia University), is used to store and organize visual and auditory content, including text, images, video, and sound. ePEARL is also a learning tool because it supports students as they plan and reflect on their learning. The partnership project between the Royal Conservatory (RCM), Queen's University, and Concordia University, takes ePEARL a major step further: this funding will enable us to develop a new music-based tool called iSCORE by completely re-designing the existing tool for music teaching. iSCORE will be available to independent music teachers and their students across Canada as they prepare for RCM examinations. iSCORE will incorporate  content features such as a music editor, a rehearsal scheduling function, video annotation, and other interactive features developed in tandem with the music teachers and students who will ultimately become the end-users of the new tool. Because iSCORE will be web-based, students, their teachers, and their parents will be able to provide input and feedback to one another at any time where they have access to the Internet.