Online Academy – What’s Coming?

The Online Academy will soon be three years old and we have a number of exciting developments in the pipeline to celebrate this milestone. Following from our previous post which provided an overview of existing resources and content, this article will give you an idea of what you can look forward to from the Online Academy over the coming months.

New content

• The Practice Tools – A detailed collection of resources building on Graham Fitch’s workshops and eBook series will be published as a complement to existing resources. These will include a course teaching the fundamentals of effective practising and a revised index of practice tools.
• Quarantine Spots Series – We will be launching a focussed series which takes one of the practice tools, Quarantining, and expands on it with demonstrations of how it can be used in context of challenging examples from popular works within the repertoire.
• Technique Library and Resources – A comprehensive library of resources focusing on improving technique and tackling technical challenges for all levels. This will include detailed demonstrations of various areas of techniques, guides to exercises and studies with contributions from current and new authors.
• Walk throughs – Our library of resources for the piano repertoire will continue to grow and will feature words by Chopin, Brahms, Beethoven, Mozart and Bach to name a few. Resources for examination syllabi will also be added on a continual basis.
• Burgmüller’s 25 Easy and Progressive Etudes – The final four walk throughs are currently in production and will be added to complete this comprehensive series shortly.
• Healthy Playing – Our set of resources on healthy playing by Penelope Roskell will be extended to include information on preventing and recovering from common pianist injuries
• Teaching Beginners – Additional lectures and demonstrations from Ilga Pitkevica on teaching the foundations of a good technique are being developed as a follow-on from her recently published videos on teaching beginners.
• Sight Reading – A new sight-reading curriculum for the advanced level along with exercises along with sample exercises from ReadAhead Level 4 extends our existing resources for elementary and early intermediate levels to cater for the intermediate and advanced levels.

Features & enhancements

• Usability and Finding Content – Miscellaneous updates to the user interfaces will be added to make navigating and finding content easier. These include a new browse page, an updated content index and a new “search wizard”. Improved context sensitive help is also being added through-out the site.
• Personalisation – Further tools allowing you to access personalised content recommendations
• Courses – Subscribers will be able to enroll in courses on specific topics which provide a step-by-step, guided pathway through Online Academy content.
• Questions and Answers – We will be launching a Q&A series which annual and premium subscribers will have the opportunity to contribute questions for possible inclusion.
• Singles – Various improvements to our recently launched “Singles” offering which provides additional once-off purchase options for selected collections of Online Academy content.
• Teaching Tools – New tools and licensing options for teachers and institutions will be added to make it easier to use content within a teaching practice and to share content with students.

We are very much looking forward to sharing the above developments with you. If you are already an Online Academy subscriber, then please be sure to sign-up for updates via our mailing list here. If you aren’t a subscriber and would like to get access to our existing resources and these new developments, then please click here.