28 ForOregonState.org/Stater c u lt uR e ILLUSTRATION BY EDEL RODRIGUEZ MAKING MUSIC AT A DISTANCE Online classes bring a new kind of music education to unexpected places. BY > TYLER HANSEN It’s nighttime in Kyiv, Ukraine, and Mykola Balakin is making a flute-like instrument called a sopilka in his home office. A software engineer by trade and a computer science student with Oregon State Ecampus, he’s new to making instruments, but after several hours of trial and error, he has a breakthrough. Utility knife in hand, Balakin carves a hole that should help the traditional Ukrainian instrument create its distinctive sound. Finally, he presses the sopilka to his lips. Its notes don’t quite merit a smile, but it’s a special moment, nonetheless. “I typically would not wake up and say, ‘It’s a day to build a new instrument,’ but that is what I did, and that was the moment I knew it was possible,” Balakin would later recall, proudly. “I like that it works. As an instrument, I do not like it, but as a handmade thing, it’s very nice.” This was not a personal undertaking. It was his final project in the Music Cultures of the World elective course he recently took online through Ecampus. Balakin’s craftsmanship in Kyiv, 5,600 miles away from Corvallis, is illustrative of Oregon State’s growing impact offering music education at a distance. The timing feels right. The new Patricia Valian Reser Center for the Creative Arts, opening this spring, will allow people to engage with art in meaningful ways like never before at OSU. Something similar is happening online, as the university delivers its music expertise through learning experiences that are breaking new ground of their own. First-of-Its-Kind Program When Assistant Professor Dana Reason made her first foray into teaching online in 2010, she started big: Her first course was on the cultural impact of the Beatles. She and College of Liberal Arts colleagues later developed what was believed to be the first online class on hiphop music and culture. That was an era in which OSU — now regularly ranked among the
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