Berklee College of Music Online Courses

[DonaldM]

I've been looking into some online courses to just get better at some some stuff. I've read and heard a lot about the Berklee College of Music online courses and wondered if anyone here has ever done one or some of these. I'm especially looking into the course on Orchestration for this Fall. I know they have a bunch of courses on Pro Tools among other recording stuff.

Any comments good or bad about these courses?

Thanks

[docbop]

Berklee Online may have some of the same instructors as Berklee School of Music but the classes and how they are taught are not the same.

I've taken a couple of the course and DO NOT recommend them. The first class I took the instructor was great. Was very involved checking for questions and reading student posts and offering help. The classes since then the instructors have gotten progressively worse. They check homework and maybe read posts once a week. Then they have a one online chat a week. The last instructor required the chat and then would sign in late, not say much and log out before hour was up. So most of the education is reading and listening to the online instruction, doing the homework. Then asking questions of your fellow students. Good or bad that is a lot of money for other students to be your main source of education.

Also there are no class materials everything is online. So you have to print or save webpages. Then most music examples graphics and audio played via Flash so you can't download the music examples. So to get material you have to spent time printing or copy and pasting the web content to a file.

So its a crapshoot on how much instructor involvement each class has. One of the classes I took was their arranging class so my experience included something similar to orchestration and it was like I described. I would say check local university or if you have working pro's in your area many will teach if asked. I would explore your other option before spending a lot of money for Berklee Online.