Open Music Academy (OMA) is a platform designed for creating and sharing open educational resources for anyone interested in music. It provides an infrastructure for students and educators that is unique in the sense that it offers tools specifically designed to learn, play and analyse music while being both free and open. Within the music world, an environment that relies heavily on copyrights and is often subject to gate keeping, the mission of the OMA is an island.
Constructed as a wiki, OMA offers documents that can be edited (CC BY-SA) as well as a media center that holds recordings, images etc. (ranging from CC BY-SA to CC0); the open source software Educandu is kept on GitHub.
As a platform, OMA provides technical tools (plugins) designed to play and analyse music: e.g. a multitrack player, a tool for visually dividing audio and video files into segments, a waveform drawer, plus interactive plugins for self-directed learning and gamification.
OMA offers tutorials on a broad and growing subject range: seminars on arranging a pop song, encyclopaedic entries on music theory, techniques and materials for engaging a class of adolescents in classical music, exercises for professional ear training, sheet music and playbacks for instrumental lessons and singing, video tutorials on producing music and videos, and more. So far, most OMA content is in German, but documents in any other language are more than welcome; the webapp interface can be set to English.
Additionally, registered members can open up private rooms that offer the same tools. These can be used for preparing content or for sharing materials with a specific group (of students or pupils e.g.).
The project is funded by the Stiftung Innovation in der Hochschullehre (2021–2025), the German foundation for innovative university teaching. At its core is a team of the University of Music and Theatre Munich, with contributions by music educators from other universities and schools.
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As a team member, I am convinced of the important work we are doing. Our goals are to build and support an open music teaching community, to make the knowledge of university-based musicians and scientists accessible to a broader public, and to provide multimedia skills to young generations of musicians and teachers.
Award Nominator
This is an established and well formed set of resources that fills a much-needed niche in OER.
Award Reviewer
This is such an exciting OER! I love that this is making music/the creation of music more accessible for all.
Award Reviewer
