I am Xavier Marican, earning a Bachelor’s of Music in Performance as a classical saxophonist, soon to enter my fourth year of study. All modern classical musicians are educators, out of convenience, as teaching lessons or masterclasses in your instrument is a sizable slice of income and important way of earning status among your peers, and also quite frequently out of an artistic compulsion, as teaching music is often as good or better a way of artistically exploring music as is playing it. The most impactful educational experiences of which I have taken part are mostly very personal: one-on-one if not in small groups in the form of teaching and recieving individual lessons and coaching of small ensembles. These settings lend themselves particularly strongly to student-centred learning, allowing groups or individuals to excel unfettered or falter in their pace without pressure or embarrassment. They give students power to focus on areas of a subject that are most important to them while still being guided by an instructive voice that knows what needs to be prioritized, whether it be glamorous or amusing or not. These values are at the centre of music education outside of large ensembles and are a large part of what makes learning an instrument compelling; building yourself up into whatever musician you want to be alongside an instructor who holds you to account in building with strong foundations.

My interest in open and distributed learning is largely sourced from unfamiliarity and discomfort. A noted weakness of mine as a young person in the digital age is that I have little love for online learning. The human aspect of having a teacher, who in offering knowledge gives to you personally their time and effort and whose face you can look back at in that moment serves as the oil in the spokes of my learning. To treasure this is not in and of itself a weakness, if anything it is a strength as both learner and educator, but in a time where “you can learn anything online” is repeated to the point of aphorism, a reliance on personal instruction can cut one off from a lot of learning. I hope that to gain a better understanding of the workings of open-access digital learning will aid me in effectively engaging with it, and that understanding what elements make for effective open-access learning will give me some help in identifying the sources of learning with which it is worth engaging.