Chelsea Green and Nadine Aboulmagd Harmonize on Guitar
Chelsea Green and Nadine Aboulmagd Harmonize on Guitar
Not everyone who creates an open textbook has previous expertise or background in using digital technology. Some folks courageously take on the challenge with little to no experience working in the online realm. Chelsea Green is one of those brave people. A musician and professor of music at the American University in Cairo (AUC), Chelsea has a background in both performance practice and theory. She has also previously worked as a guitar teacher for students of all ages and abilities. Her love of teaching has now extended to her career at AUC, where she founded the Bachelor of Musical Arts Major in Guitar, the first ever degree in guitar performance in Egypt.
Chelsea’s dedication to music and pedagogy were central to her interest in creating Sight Reading for Guitar: The Keep Going Method, an OER that supports students as they are learning to play. Chelsea identified a particular need for a tool to help learners develop skills in sight reading—the ability to see, interpret, and immediately play musical notations on the page. Having once been a sight-reading novice herself, Chelsea knows that it is difficult to learn guitar without that ability. Although there are many YouTube tutorial videos on playing guitar, few of them focus on learning how to sight read, and none that Chelsea could find provided the mix of theory and practical learning that was needed for the classroom. Over the years, Chelsea had developed an effective method that did just that, and now she wanted to be able to formalize it in a textbook for her students.
At first, Chelsea considered writing the book as a commercial product, but the business details of conventional publishing started to bore her. She found herself zoning out during these discussions, and losing focus on the content itself, as well as the reason she wanted to create the book in the first place. It was not the way she wanted to expend her energy, even if she ended up making money from it. She soon decided to create the book as an open resource, but needed help with the technical elements of doing so.
At the AUC’s Center for Learning and Teaching (CLT), Chelsea met with Associate Professor of Practice, Maha Bali. The two originally discussed the idea of creating a short online course, a MOOC (a massive open online course), or a SPOC (small private online course). Through Maha, Chelsea was introduced to Senior Instructional Designer, Nadine Aboulmagd, also within the CLT. Nadine has a great deal of experience creating online content for blended and online courses, and also teaches a course on multimedia and technology for the Professional Educators’ Diploma at the Graduate School of Education at AUC. She and Maha recommended developing Sight Reading as an open textbook, and together, the three agreed to do so, working with the support of Rebus Community. An additional hope was that this might also lead to opportunities for translating the textbook into other