Redefining "Off Campus": Music Education Anytime, Anywhere

Dave Kusek
Director, Berklee Media, Berklee College of Music
Boston - MA

Tell us what you do and the specific challenge you faced.
In the last 50 years, Berklee College of Music in Boston has trained many of contemporary music's most famous names: Quincy Jones, Diana Krall, John Mayer, and members of Aerosmith and the Dixie Chicks are just a few Berklee alumni who are changing the face of contemporary music. We also graduate each year the music educators, engineers, producers and promoters who drive the music industry -- our alumni network is everywhere today's music is being made and studied. But a potential "curb" to our growth are the realities of real estate ... real estate in one of the priciest sections of Boston. Berklee's enrollment has steadily grown over the years. And as advancements in technologies such as ProTools and other software and hardware innovations are changing the way music is created, we were finding ourselves literally turning people away because of limited classroom, dorm and office space. Our challenge: how to offer a Berklee education to all the people asking for it, without compromising the quality of instruction and experience? As the guy overseeing Berklee Press and many of Berklee's online initiatives, I'm one of the people charged with making that happen in innovative ways.

What was your moment of truth?
My real moment of truth/insight occurred several years ago, when I was home with my family for a Thanksgiving visit at my parent's house in Kensington, CT. My mom worked as a music teacher in the New Britian, CT school system. Teachers like my mother traditionally have had very few professional development resources, aside from a few annual trade shows ... to actually keep them current on the latest trends in the music field. Indeed, their students themselves were often far more aware of what was happening in music than the teachers were. That November we were talking about Napster and the whole MP3 phenomenon, and the fact that the traditional distribution and power dynamics in the music industry were coming under assault from very decentralized and tough-to-monitor forces. I had been working on mapping out a new strategy for Berklee's online school, but that conversation helped me see the opportunity in a whole new way, as something far bigger than I had previously envisioned.

What were the results?
Two years later, we finished development of Berkleemusic.com, an online music school and career development center for the music industry. At Berkleemusic.com we teach music production, writing, theory, education and performance. We're attracting professional musicians, music teachers, people interested in accelerating a career in music, and people interested in mastering the technology that lies underneath it all. One of them, a systems administrator at NASA by day and leader of a Caribbean steel drum band by night, told us that he just spent $1000 on studio time for pre-production that he could have done completely at home with what he learned at Berkleemusic.com in our Protools Basics course. He also met a student from Portugal in the class. The two became friendly via email, traded MP3s of each other's work, and the they are now incorporating each other's tracks in their own recordings. They've never even spoken face to face! These sorts of student experiences tell me that we are succeeding in transcending the physical campus, and are extending the Berklee educational experience out to people who couldn't otherwise have access to it.

What's your parting tip?
Set a direction and don't worry at first about exactly how you'll execute. If your idea is the right one, you'll attract the team that will help you execute far better than you could have done on your own anyway.