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Classification:
Educational music-oriented collaborative environments
Country:
Description:
It is a portal that provides a variety of educational materials to learn to play some musical instruments. Resources include written texts, audio samples and video lessons, conducted by professional musicians.
Target Group:
The portal offers lessons and tutorials to learn to play a musical instrument, in particular electric guitar, electric bass, keyboards and drums. The limited number of supported musical instruments indicates that the target users of the portal are young, interested in pop-rock genres. The subscribers to the service are over 1100. Despite this, the level of participation in the discussion is quite low, with just over 300 posts in the last 3 years.
Technology:
MAIN PORTAL: Bespoke code written in ASP.NET.
TOOLS:
- Online lessons: Currently HTML and Flash, but the company plans to move to HTML5
- Community: YAF - http://yetanotherforum.net/
- Offline: Xtractor analyses MIDI input to give feedback on lessons. Bespoke code written using the Microsoft.NET framework.
- Third Party: The Studio lesson is based on Steinberg's Sequel 2 for which there is a 45 day free trial
COMMENTS: The company has sustainability and ubiquity concerns over the use of Flash for the delivery of their online multimedia content and plans to move to HTML5 in the near future. Their philosophy is to create as simple an experience as possible in order to support learning.
Source: This information was provided from email and telephone conversations with Brian Greene, Director of Gigajam.
Usability and Accessibility:
The main aim of Gigajam Online is online instrument and music theory tuition via video lessons and via the performances of musical exercises executed with a MIDI controller and evaluated by a software program. In this sense, the collaborative and creative aspects are very limited and are mainly taking place within the frame of a standard user forum. The user is mainly watching instructional video material on the website and training his instrumental skills in tuition software.
Link hierarchy and easy access to the main features of Gigajam Online make the web portal rather intuitive to use. However, the software used to carry the tuition seems outdated and requires the use of non-standard component: .Net Framework on Windows, external Quicktime plug-in on Mac, and the Mac version of the software is made for older PPC machines which were discontinued several years ago and not supported any longer as of OS 10.7 Lion. For a younger user base, this might lead to a negative first impression of the system regardless of its pedagogical worth, and a diminished interest of the platform over time.
