In the third of our Open Education Week 2024 open textbook interviews, Charlie Farley  talks to Dr Nikki Moran, Senior Lecturer in Music at the ECA. Niki is lead author and presenter of the University of Edinburgh’s Coursera MOOC (Massive Open Online Course), Fundamentals of Music Theory, engaging 300000 active learners and recruiting around 500 new students per week. Fundamentals of Music Theory was the first open e-textbook published on  Edinburgh Diamond, the University’s Open Publishing Service, as part of a pilot project in collaboration with the OER Service.

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Charlie Farley  
Could you introduce yourself and your position here at the university? 

Dr Nikki Moran 
Hi. I’m Nikki Moran. I’m a senior lecturer in music in the Reid School of Music, which is part of ECA (Edinburgh College of Arts). 

Charlie Farley   
The creation of your open e-textbook was part of a pilot project, and the first open textbook published on the University’s open publishing service, Edinburgh Diamond. Could you share how that came about? 

Dr Nikki Moran
Your colleague, Lorna Campbell, approached me looking to pilot making an open e-textbook with student interns using a Student Experience Grant.  She identified the Fundamentals of Music Theory MOOC, as Lorna was aware that the content was out there already, open licensed, and in popular use.

At that time, I was heavily involved in the development and the launch of a new on-site course as part of our BMus curriculum. The content overlapped substantially with content we cover in the MOOC, and I was using some of the materials trialled already in those MOOC video lectures and working on a design where we could re-use those as part of a flipped classroom design.

We had students who’d come through the on-site course in its first instance and because the MOOC had been online for quite a while there were also tried and tested materials with this global population of learners.  

Charlie Farley    
Could you talk a little bit about the students who worked on the project with you? 

Dr Nikki Moran
They worked with Lorna and the OER team through the Student Experience Grant. I was aware of the Information Services Student Internships, but this really opened my eyes to the possibilities for students to experience professionally valuable training. And the volume of responses, the number of students who applied because they wanted to work on that project was breath-taking. 

We appointed students with international perspectives very deliberately. The MOOC is entirely global – learners from every continent – and there’s an important communication consideration about music literacy and different music foundation backgrounds. There are some really important and exciting critical considerations. So, we had, Ifeanyichukwu Ezinma a second-year undergraduate BMus Music student and a MasterCard Foundation scholar from Nigeria. Ana Reina García, a third-year undergraduate MA Music student. Ana was from the south of Spain and had already been through the course. And Kari Ding, coming from Hong Kong, was a postgrad MMus Musicology student.

(Read more about the team on the Open E-Textbooks for Access to Music Education blog)

Charlie Farley    
I remember the students going back and forth with you on how to take the existing content and structure it into an e-textbook, eventually deciding to break it up into sections so readers could go to the content most relevant to their needs. 

Dr Nikki Moran
I handed over to them this huge bank of text, written notes, video lecture content, transcripts, in-lecture quizzes, and revision quizzes. What I found quite fascinating was the students first thoughts were to order he material in a pretty conventional way – the way that they might have received it as part of a more traditional, non-critical music theory training.

In the discussion we all came to understand the value of an of an open textbook for this topic. And how everybody needs to come at this from their own distinctive background of musical experience and knowledge in their prior education. 

The students helped me to see that it was necessary to draw components that were more directive – defining the rudiments of symbols used to translate certain concepts of musical sound. Particularly, we worked on the section dealing with duration and rhythm.  There’s an enormous amount of rudimentary music theory education material out there. The feedback that we had from learners on the MOOC showed us that there was more that we could do with that topic. 

What we know from the MOOC is that this there’s this huge appetite for adult learners wanting to develop and learn this topic. 

Charlie Farley   
Since its publication in 2021, Fundamentals of Music Theory has been downloaded over 21,000 times from Edinburgh Diamond. What next for the book and its content?  

Dr Nikki Moran  

I have the 2nd edition of the of the of the open e-textbook fully formed and ready to go. I was ready to press go on it very soon after the first one, because I’d simultaneously developed a script and recorded new materials to update the MOOC with Tom Butler and input from lots of other music colleagues. But some things were changing, and I didn’t want to launch another iteration too soon. I would like for the 2nd edition to be one that can really sit there for a while and not need amendments.  

I use the open access materials in a different version to support the on-site students; the 2nd edition changes are also more directly usable for on-site students as well. 

Charlie Farley   
Do you have any tips or advice you’d share for any other teaching staff who might be thinking about making an open textbook? 

Dr Nikki Moran
I think the best advice is, don’t be afraid. The point of making something entirely open access and open licenced is, you’re not just saying you may look at this, you’re inviting people to take it for themselves and to reshape it.  

Be courageous with sharing materials and inviting students to be part of the process. In your academic role, you’re the link to the knowledge community, to the discipline. But it’s also your job to learn more about how what you’re putting out there is landing. Working with students at that point of materials development is incredibly helpful. I can’t overstate how immensely valuable those discussion are, and I think you can’t help but learn a lot from co-authoring.