Announcing Noteflight Learning Edition
We’ve forsaken Cambridge’s frozen streets for the warmer climate of San Antonio, Texas this week, where Noteflight is exhibiting at the Texas Music Educators Association/Technology Institute for Music Educators pair of tandem conventions. It’s 80 degrees here, but we’re not here for the weather: we’re here to announce and demonstrate our new product, Noteflight Learning Edition (NLE).
I won’t repeat all of the material on NLE that you can read and watch at the above page, or in our press release. To briefly summarize the picture here: NLE extends the capabilities of the free noteflight.com website, in a way that is aimed at music teachers, music departments and music schools. NLE provides 1) a secure space for each learning community to share and publish its content separate from Noteflight.com, 2) a seamless integration with online course management systems such as Moodle, Blackboard and Haiku, and 3) a really smooth way of handling musical assignments in which students automatically receive private copies of a template created by an instructor and do their work within these copies. The instructor can later access these copies and respond to them individually.
Noteflight Learning Edition’s integration with course management systems (CMSs) is a big deal in a couple of ways. These systems are designed to build and manage web-based content for teaching and learning, and Noteflight is the web-based music notation tool — so putting these ingredients together permits the construction of an online music curriculum that works like a coherent whole, not like a bunch of desktop tools roughly stitched together. Also, these systems manage courses, course rosters, and user authentication in ways that make sense for a variety of settings: higher education, K-12, and non-institutional. NLE works hand-in-hand with each CMS’s way of loggin in users; and it accepts a CMS user automatically as a Noteflight user via a single-sign-on mechanism.
While the noteflight.com site will remain free, NLE requires a modest subscription fee. There are two ways to buy NLE. First, post-secondary institutions can license it yearly, based on their music department or course enrollment figures. Secondly, we will offer a special K-12 package in conjunction with Haiku LMS by Haiku Learning Systems, which combines NLE with Haiku’s elegant course and roster management.
We’re putting the finishing touches on NLE right now, and of course we’re demoing it at this show this week. We expect to have it ready in March; look for another announcement soon!
April 14th, 2009 at 5:32 am
Wow! Is there a way to use the learning edition as an individual, but with my own LMS instead of Haiku?
April 14th, 2009 at 5:45 am
The short answer is “yes”. Learning Edition works with other LMS systems besides Haiku, although we are focusing integration efforts on a few main players (e.g. Moodle, WebCT) since there are so many minor ones.
November 2nd, 2009 at 6:11 pm
Can Noteflight LE stand by itself without a separate LMS? I really just need an online notation program that I can use to supplement my one 6th grade class using Yamaha MIE. I would like to be able to attach comments to their scores, play them and print them off, and give them the ability to access them from home, but I don’t need a separate LMS. It’s overkill to me. Can I do this?
If not, will Noteflight work with Infinite Campus which our district is going to next school year?
November 2nd, 2009 at 9:39 pm
The short answer is: today, no, Learning Edition doesn’t stand by itself. We are looking at the possibility of such a package, however, and are aware that there are a significant number of users who feel as you do.
…joe