One of the things I really enjoy about being a self-publisher composer is that there’s a variety of tasks to work on (read: get distracted by) when I’m not composing. This is a story about one of those tasks.
You may know that I’m addition to my work as a composition instructor at NDSU and my work as a composer, one of my side gigs is web development—I write software (Liszt) for running schools of music. So of course, one of my composing tasks is maintaining a website where people can buy my music. And to make that happen, you kind of need some sort of shopping cart.
For the past several years, I’ve used a great shopping cart platform called Snipcart to handle the shopping part of my websites, both at KyleVanderburg.com and at NoteForge. It’s kind of a drop-in solution: include some code, and as long as your “add to cart” buttons are coded right, they take care of everything. It’s $10 a month, and they package up all the purchasing information and send it off to Stripe, my payment processor.
Recently though, Snipcart has been unable to charge my card for the monthly subscription. When I’ve pressed for diagnostic information, they’ve pointed me to Stripe, and I figure if I’m going to have to deal with Stripe anyway, why not save $10 a month and build my own shopping cart?
The past few days have involved just that. Here’s how it has worked.
First off, I started off with some things that helped out already:
My sites are built on Liszt, which means I have a lot of control over the databases and how the site can communicate with the database.
I already have a database with info about prices, shipping weight, product images, etc. I’m not tracking stocking info because most of my work is print-on-demand at this point.
I have a pre-existing relationship/development account with Stripe due to building a payment gateway for invoicing several years ago.
I don’t want to use the pre-existing payment gateway I’ve built because…we’ll, I just don’t. It would make things complicated (collecting name and address information for example). We’ll just let Stripe handle it.
My websites already have a built-in off-canvas “drawer” component that I can use (on the NoteForge site, it comes up when you click the perusal score button).
I want to take advantage of Stripe’s checkout feature, so the only thing I need to worry about is the cart functionality.
So with those constraints, the first thing I need are a couple of databases, one for the “cart” and one for “cart items.” Cart doesn’t need much more than some sort of identifier, while cart items need fields for cart id, item, and quantity. (It occurs to me on this write-up that there might be a way to build this without a Cart database, but too late now).
Next up, we need a cart page on the website to handle all the cart functions. I decided to program it in PHP because I’m faster at that than writing it with JavaScript. The first time the cart page (let’s call it cart.php) is loaded, it creates a Cart database record, gets a Globally Unique Identifier (GUID) and writes that GUID as a cookie to the user’s browser. (I considered using HTML local storage or PHP sessions, and cookies seemed like the easiest.) Liszt just generated GUIDs for every table row anyway so that’s easy.
In pseudocode: (Note: none of this is actually production code, but it’s close enough to explain it)
<?php
//Generate Cart ID if not set.
if(empty($_COOKIE['NoteForgeCart'])){
$cart->build(); //This will create the record and the GUID.
setcookie("NoteForgeCart",$cart->guid,time()+60*60*24*30,"/"); /* expires in 30 days */
$cartid=$cart->guid;
}else{$cartid = $_COOKIE['NoteForgeCart'];}
?>
I opted to use url constructions like cart.php?addItem=myAwesomeScore to manipulate the cart. This requires that every change to the cart cart involves a page reload, but the code is lightweight enough to where I’m not worried about performance. I could have written this in JavaScript and done some sort of Ajax call but…this was faster. Oh and of course instead of myAwesomeScore, I’m using the GUID of the product we’re adding.
From a user interface level, this means that product links can just be to cart.php?addNewItem=guid. Some css styling to load that page in an iFrame in the drawer I mentioned, and it’s an easy implementation.
Retrieving cart contents is easy since we can just do a database query for all the rows in the Cart Items database with a certain cart I’d. That code goes on Cart.php last.
Adding an item to the cart that’s already in the cart proves a challenge. When an item is added to the cart, the cart contents needs to be loaded to see if that item is already on the cart, and if so, to increase the quantity by one. This requires some additions to the addNewItem method.
Changing quantities poses the next problem. A simple way would be to include a text field for quantity, and then add a handler for when it changes, to make a database update. That was a little more complicated than I wanted it to be. I considered + and – buttons, but if the page reloaded every time, it would be obnoxious for large quantities. I considered +1, +10, and +100 buttons, but that seemed similarly awkward. I opted for + and – buttons that ask the user how much to add or remove from the cart.
The next challenge is the actual checkout process. We need an intermediate page between cart.php and Stripe to format the data—something like cart-process.php. This will package the cart in a format that Stripe understands and pass it off to Stripe. Since the cart ID is just in a cookie, we can use that. This takes a bit of time to figure out the nested arrays, but the Stripe documentation (and the Stripe errors in the Apache logs) are well-written.
Once you can get Stripe to catch the data, you’re home free.
There’s a lot of things I haven’t sorted out in this quick and dirty process: shipping prices, whether products need to be shipped, taxes (though I think Stripe is doing that for me)(I figured that out since this write-up), digital assets, and so on. Snipcart used to automatically send out download links for digital goods, and I think I’ll just have to not have that for a bit.
I’ve been using a GitHub project to track everything, here’s what that looks like:
GitHub Project View
There’s some room for improvement, but it’s not bad for several hours of worth over the weekend to save $120 a year by writing 200 lines of code.
This code will (hopefully) go live later this week.
Several things that are bouncing around my head these days:
First off, let’s talk about the summer schedule. Hopefully this will be a productive working summer. But in between that work, some interesting projects:
For ten days in June, I’ll be in NYC to help run the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival (NYCEMF). I don’t have a piece on the festival this year, I’m just working. That should help me get my mixing, troubleshooting, and gaff-taping fix for the year.
The first week in July, I’ll be teaching Audio Technology at the International Music Camp. Lots of firsts for that one—first time at the International Peace Gardens, first time teaching at IMC, first time using Cubase…
At the beginning of August, I’ll be presenting a paper on composition program curricula at the Aspen Composers Conference. A few days later, I’ll be teaching a seminar on recording technology at NDSU’s Music Education Summer Symposium.
Next: Social media. Ugh. I’ve never really liked it. I feel like I always have to be “On” to use it—as in, everything I post has to be amusing or witty or something more than “I’m eating a sandwich.” I’ve long suspected that it’s the cause of most of our recent societal problems. As I teach freshmen every year, my believe that being constantly catered to by algorithms isn’t healthy. And my recent reading list hasn’t helped things.
Now, I haven’t gotten out the tinfoil hat and I’m not saying that I agree with everything I’ve just listed. But these things have been on my mind for a while.
This is part of a larger thing I’m going through right now, where I’m realizing that I don’t have to be good at everything. I’m not good at contributing to social media (and consuming it isn’t good for me) and that’s okay.
I’m not good at email either, but that’s a project and a story for another day.
This leads me to my third thing—the scarcity mindset. This came up in Beyond Talent earlier in Entrepreneurship this spring, and it struck the students (and me) differently than usual. For much of grad school and my early academic career, I’d say “Yes” to whatever project or job came my way. And this never really stopped—even though I have full-time employment and several side projects, every time I see a job posting I think “OOH! I could do that too!” Not “instead.” “Too.”
Diversification and risk management are good things, but there’s a point of diminishing returns where you’re spread too thin. I just need to calm down and focus on the plates that are already spinning.
OOH! Or I could go back to school to become a CPA!
It’s turning out to be a busy semester! I’m teaching a couple of new-to-me classes—Music Research and Bibliography for the grad students and the Symphonic Literature for both grads and undergrads. These are paired with my normal Music Entrepreneurship, the bassoon part of Woodwind Methods II, and a studio of 13 composers.
Let’s talk about performances. I’ve recently updated the calendar, here’s what’s in store!
February 13: Kelly Burns, Cassie Keogh, and Tyler Wottrich premiere my Letters to the Poetry Editor that came about from my work with the NDSU Press.
March 5-6: We’ll present Letters to the Poetry Editor at the College Music Society Central Conference in Omaha. I’ll also be presenting a paper on composer workflow.
The next weekend, March 11-12, I’ll be in Oklahoma for the College Music Society South Central Conference, where Tempest in a Teakettle will be performed.
March 24-26, I’ll be in St. Petersburg, Florida for the Contemporary Art Music Project’s CAMPGround22, where Tape Piece will be performed.
April 21-23, we’re hosting a new music festival at NDSU, including a couple of concerts as part of our Unity concert series, and then a student and faculty (that’s me!) composers’ recital on the 23rd.
May 1, the NDSU Faculty Woodwind Quintet will play Course of Empire as part of the Fargo Moorhead Symphony Orchestra chamber series.
Oh, also at some point this semester, the New Rockford-Sheyenne High School Band will be premiering the new Steam Powered Rocket in New Rockford. I’ll update the website and the blog when I get that date.
I never really understood when classmates (or students) said they were “done” with school. I get it now. Learning is fun, but I have work to do.
It’s hard to balance being a human, a student, a professor, a composer, and a programmer. I have to start curating this down.
I started and finished the Publishing certificate at NDSU. I learned a lot about literary publishing (and saw some book projects to fruition), and it was SO MUCH FUN. I did the program to learn more about music publishing because I thought some things would transfer over, and they do.
I also learned that there’s not much structured learning with music publishing—it’s very much apprenticeship and make-it-up-as-you-go. And if that’s the case, what’s stopping me from making up more stuff?
I started making up publishing stuff for my students.
Are we going to start a music publishing certificate in ND? No. Are we going to nudge composers to work with the NDSU Press to get some experience in publishing? Very yes.
I proposed and implemented a new BM Composition program (the first in the Dakotas), which was either the product of or the cause of taking a full-time position at NDSU.
My parents decided to move to North Dakota—this one is still in progress.
I started using Johnny Decimal as an organizational system, and I think it’s working.
I paid off my student loans.
I stopped buying stuff from Amazon. This was easier than I thought it would be. I have lots to say about this later.
I moved my cloud computing to Microsoft Azure.
I got new headshots made (stay tuned!) and had my sheet music covers redesigned.
We adopted another cat, Lorraine.
I only wrote three pieces, which is embarrassing. But I like them all, so that’s good.
I took on a piece for adaptable instrumentation (flex band) and electronics, which has been a whole new experience.
We installed new livestreaming equipment at NDSU.
I learned how to use printing equipment from the 1880s.
I learned that I like to use printing equipment from the 1880s.
I found out how much money it costs to buy printing equipment from the 1880s.
I found out how much money it costs to find out you’re probably lactose intolerant. But as a bonus I found out I don’t have gluten sensitivity. Either way, I still can’t have pizza.
I learned that you can do whatever you want to do with commas, as long as you’re consistent. I also learned that I still don’t know how to properly use semicolons.
I had some writer’s block earlier this year. After completing Shindig for horn choir, I flailed a lot from about March to August. I think part of it was the workload from taking classes and teaching a full load across two campuses. But another part of it was that I spent mid-to-late part of the semester designing, proposing, and planning a composition program at NDSU.
Our composition degree has been approved and accredited, and we started our first students this fall. And as an extension of that, I’ve joined NDSU full time.
Does the world really need another composition program?Probably not. I attended a paper this summer about the overcrowding in the composition world, and especially in the time of COVID, the opportunities seem to be dwindling.
Does the region need a composition program?Yes. Looking at professional undergraduate (Bachelor of Music) degrees, ours is the first in the Dakotas. There are four in Minnesota, one in Montana, and one in Manitoba. It gets better the further south and east one goes. But new music opportunities are, well, not numerous up here.
Of course, at many schools, students interested in composition can take composition lessons within the context of the BA or BS in Music. My intention is that having a collection of degree-seeking composers will give us the ability to do several things we wouldn’t be able to do within the context of a BA or BS, such as produce more composer opportunities and resources for the region. Things such as a new music concert series, Dakota composer residencies, a student-run music press to experiment with self-publishing, and assembling materials for high school students interested in composition.
NDSU is an interesting place to do all this. We have a named and endowed School of Music within a comprehensive STEM-focused Land Grant university, which puts us in an ideal place for both collaboration and outreach. We already have a full range of academic music programs from the BM to the DMA. Our undergraduate music curriculum already requires Music Entrepreneurship which intersects with the university’s entrepreneurship initiatives. And NDSU is already quite new music friendly, with the annual Fissinger Composition Contest, the new Pilafian Composition Contest, and regular performances of works by living composers.
So looking at the reality of the new music scene in North Dakota and what the future of music composition might be like, we’ve tried to make the degree as flexible as possible. Composers have to know a little bit of everything, so we’re having them do the same instrumental or vocal performance requirements as our BA/BS students do. Proficiency on piano, conducting, counterpoint, advanced theory, and instrumental arranging, of course. But then we’re also opening up a chunk of electives for the degree, giving students the opportunity to gain some additional specialization or marketable skills. This might include taking some of the music methods classes to learn how to play all the instruments. Or taking on a certificate or minor through the college of business, such as Entrepreneurship, Accounting, Business Administration, Management Information Systems, or Community Development. Or pursuing minors in Creative Writing, English, or Theatre Arts. Or there’s the certificate in Publishing.
The hope is to twofold: To create resources and opportunities for composers in the Dakotas, and to create a composer incubator which gives students the tools they need to be successful musicians in the region and the world.
The more I’ve composed, and the more I’ve taught music, the more I realize that there’s just so much interesting stuff out there to learn, a lot of which intersects with music composition. Psychology of creativity, business administration, critical theory, aesthetics, higher education administration–these are all things that sound terribly interesting.
Cassie’s work at NDSU affords me a half-tuition waiver, so this spring I decided to become a bison. An entire degree seemed like a bit much given the rest of my workload, but some of our graduate certificate offerings seemed like a good place to start. The most logical, I reasoned, was the graduate certificate in Publishing, which is offered through the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Science working through the North Dakota State University Press. Even though NDSU’s press is a literary press, the business side of things and the publishing process would be the same as it is in music publishing. After all, everything I know about publishing music is from 1) trial and error or 2) things I read on the internet.
I had to check my transcript, but even though I defended my dissertation in May of 2014, the last seated class I took was Dr. Ken Stephenson’s Bartok, Prokofiev, Chicago in the summer of 2013. So, seven years after being a student, here I am again, this time with experience from the other side of the classroom.
So we’re over halfway through: here’s how it’s going. For starters, it’s the first time I’ve been in a class in a while where I haven’t been in charge. This is great, in some ways it’s like a mini-vacation in the middle of the day. Make no mistake, it’s real work. But it’s nice to follow instead of leading for a bit.
XXXXX (Unpublished Manuscript of 380 pages which we’re editing).
XXXXX (Advance Review Copy of a book to be published in August at 210 pages which we’re proofing).
30 chapbooks of poetry for an acquisitions project.
It looks like a lot, but it doesn’t seem like a lot. Maybe part of it is because it’s real, actual work. These are live projects. The poetry acquisitions project will result in us picking one of those books of poetry to publish. The novel will be printed with my edits. The advance review copy needs someone to proofread it. Everything we do in class matters.
My graduate project for this class involves creating an online music publishing boot camp.
This has made me think of quite a few things, to come later.
When I first built Liszt, it required (logically) that users have a username and password. Well, more correctly, it required that I have a username and password, since I was the only one using it. As it grew and I got better at programming, I kept slightly upgrading the credential process and permissions system–the last iteration used a salted password based on a proprietary hashing algorithm.
When storing usernames and passwords, the worst way to go about it is to store passwords in plain text. If your password is “password”, then you just put “password” in the database. Hashed passwords are a little better. It involves taking a one-way Hash, which is a way to take a variable length string like “password” or “pwd” and maps it to data of a fixed size, like 36 characters. The problem here is that if multiple people have the same password, if a bad actor were to steal the User database in Liszt, they could cross reference hashed passwords with password hints.
Liszt never had password hints though, so…but whatever.
Encrypted passwords are alright, but since encryption has a sibling named decryption, it’s safe only as long as the encryption key is safe.
The safest way to store passwords oneself is to combine the user’s password with what’s called a salt. In the case of Liszt, I took a hashed combination of the users ID number, combined with a hashed combination of the user’s password, hashed the result for good measure, and saved that in the database. That way, even if everyone had the same password, it wouldn’t show up in the database as the same password. Everyone gets their own gibberish.
Much of my philosophy on how to properly authenticate users comes from YouTuber Tom Scott–most specifically, his “How Not to Store Passwords (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZtInClXe1Q, which I’ve just explained in brief) and “The Fictional Day Google Forgot to Check Passwords” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4GB_NDU43Q). And as I onboarded more and more students, it made more sense to start using alternative providers–Since most clients used Microsoft Office 365, having Microsoft handle the authentication made the most sense. That way, I never have to deal with the passwords.
I wrote much of the code to handle the OAUTH login myself, based on snippets I found online and bolting them to Liszt’s Single Sign On system. Liszt doesn’t use external frameworks for the simple reasons that 1) They either didn’t exist and I wasn’t smart enough to use them when I get started, and 2) It would be a massive undertaking now, and Liszt is kind of its own platform. Because of this, I didn’t use a lot of third-party libraries.
In late 2020, I finally integrated the PHP package manager Composer because I needed it for some storage work I was doing (maybe a blog post in there too), which opened up the possibility of using some existing packages and modules I previously either didn’t use, or integrated manually. One of these things is the League of Extraordinary Packages’ OAUTH Client.
At the beginning of 2021, Liszt contained four login systems. The first was the original Liszt username/password combo, the second was Microsoft 365 for registered users, the third was Microsoft 365 for students and clients, and the last was
A hacked-together beta version of the Google OAUTH code, which worked fine on the Google end, but I never really properly wrote the Liszt end. My work in January has been to reduce Liszt to one login system that can handle multiple providers. Which is…really what I should have done at the beginning.
This sounds reasonably simple, but here are some of the challenges:
The Liszt Login code is one of those things that I play with every couple of years, and as long as it works, I don’t question it. So the code–which does a lot of things including allowing for cross-domain logins (logging into Liszt automatically logs you into Liszt Swipe, Liszt Studio (defunct), Liszt Account Management, ScoreShare, AudioAtlas, and anything else that uses the Liszt login system). This is…pretty hairy.
Liszt accounts and Liszt student/client accounts are totally separate entities, and it’s possible to have access to both. And what’s more, it’s possible to have access to multiple client accounts. Undoubtedly what would happen is that a student would try to log into Liszt instead of the Liszt Portal, and then that ends up being an email.
There’s no onboarding process for Liszt, and only a rudimentary one for Liszt Portal.
There’s also no account sign-up.
Also, I wanted the following:
I wanted the ability to add service providers (Google, Apple, etc.) later.
I wanted the ability to have a third class of authentication–There are registered users, there are registered clients, but I also wanted a basic identity provider–unregistered visitors. People who might need to be authenticated in some way, but I don’t need a full account for. I call this “fingerprinting.”
So there’s just a ton of access control flow going on. Here’s what that looks like now.
For starters, when I coded the original Liszt Office 365 login setup, I used my personal email account. Since we’re upgrading, I moved it to NoteForge. Sound easy? Yes. Is easy? Microsoft now requires that commercial or business accounts be verified, which is a reasonably straightforward, though undocumented process. What that ultimately means is that instead of this:
Liszt now asks for permissions like this:
Even though it’s the same app, in the view of Microsoft it’s different, so all users will have to re-authorize Liszt. Only this time, it comes with a nice blue checkmark.
So Microsoft (or Google or whoever I end up using as providers) verifies the login–Liszt never sees the password or login information, it just gets Profile information, who you are, what your email address is, etc. Then Liszt has to figure out what to do with you. And that flow is, simply, complicated.
The most straightforward cases are either registered users or identified clients/students logging in–It just passes the info on to the appropriate part of Liszt. Next are users or clients who haven’t logged in before and need their Microsoft username applied to their Liszt profile. Reasonably simple.
What about Clients who are trying to log in as Users? Or vice versa? Now Liszt tries to nudge you in the right direction:
Alright, we have those. Next up are people who are clients in multiple Liszt sites–which are arguably few, but better to take care of this now while I know what the code does. If you’re logging in at the wrong place, Liszt will now try to nudge you towards the right client site.
At NDSU, we tried allowing students to self-enroll in 2019, and that worked really well. But, it was a completely manual solution. As in, I wrote some code that said “enroll at this website, get attached to the Marching Band.” With this system, I’ve built in hooks to allow students to self-enroll by inputting a code, which will grant them the appropriate access and assign them to the appropriate groups. That’s not hooked up yet, but it’s ready to be written.
People who are logging in who just need to be fingerprinted? That’s easy–since we’re not checking them against a database, we just package their data and send it to the appropriate Liszt-built system.
Finally, there’s the user onboarding flow, which is designed for creating new registered user accounts. That group will either want to get access to an existing site, or to create a whole new site. That last group, I’m not ready to automate yet, so Liszt collects their information and creates a workorder. Those new users to an existing site, however, now get the option to type in a secret code (provided by the administrator) which creates a permissionless user for that site. Admins can go in and assign the required permissions afterward.
Complicated? Sure. Better in the long term? Way better. In fact, I coded the Google login code for the system in about ten minutes this morning.
Progress? Very yes.
The new version of the Liszt login system goes live later this week.
I did a lot of nonsense teaching things last semester. Or rather, things that seem like nonsense, but that are grounded in my composition/creative and programmer/system-building tendencies. Some of these things worked. Probably the last part of a 3-part series that I thought I’d forget about but somehow didn’t. Part 1: Late Work Passes Part 2: Choose-your-own-adventure Projects
I read somewhere (if I had to guess, it was in A Perfect Mess) about how the most efficient use of crosswalks is when about half of pedestrians waited for the lights to change, and about half of pedestrians dart across the street to dodge traffic. If everyone were to wait, it would be terribly congested. If everyone were to ignore the signals, it would be chaos.
This semester I let my students pick their own due dates. Which sounds like madness. Here’s why it wasn’t.
I got this idea originally from Sanna Pederson at OU, who used to let us turn in our graduate musicology term papers whenever we wanted to. This worked fine for grad students, or at least it worked fine for me. Presumably if it didn’t work, she wouldn’t have done it.
For Entrepreneurship and Skills for Academic Success, students picked their own due dates, with some restrictions. In Entrepreneurship, required projects had set due dates, while optional projects were left to student discretion. For Skills for Academic Success, students could choose their own due dates, but one project had to be completed each week. (More information on the curriculum in Part 2).
In both classes, the first project is a “semester plan” where students plot their assignments for the semester. They get credit for schedule management, which is exactly what I want them to do as part of these classes. If they need to update their semester plan, they can do so via letter.
I kept track of all this in Excel, because Blackboard was no help.
As I mentioned in part 1 when talking about Late Work Passes, my late work policy is that all work is accepted in the week that it’s due. So if students pick a due date of Monday, I’ll accept that work through Saturday.
In Excel, I had a column for student name, class, and project. Next, I had the student’s due date, followed by a column showing the weekday of the due date (=WEEKDAY(D2)). This allowed me to calculate the late-work deadline with the formula (=D3+(7-E3)), or (=Due_date+(7-(Weekday of Due Date))).
When a student submitted an assignment, I just cross-referenced my spreadsheet to see if the assignment was valid. Like with the Late Work Passes, students basically took care of this and I could have ignored my spreadsheet. But I didn’t. And I won’t.
Grading
I figured that this would take up a lot of time, and to offset that I changed up my grading policy. I don’t necessarily need 100 points of gradation to give feedback for creative work, so I moved to check-grading, which looks like this:
Check-Plus: Acceptable; Needs no further work The submitted assignment is polished, professional, and indicative of the level of work expected from a professional musician. Any improvements to the project would only add to the level of professionalism of the assignment. Receives: 100% of points.
Check: Acceptable; Could improve The submitted assignment is acceptable and meets the purpose as requested, however, it still leaves some things to be desired such as additional information, formatting, word usage, etc. Receives: 80% of points.
X: Try Again The submitted assignment is rejected for one or more of the following reasons:
It is not formatted in a conventional, useful, or ergonomic way.
The information it contains is lacking or false.
It is not presented in a manner that represents your work as a professional musician.
Receives: 60% of points
X-Minus: No apparent effort The assignment was either not submitted, or the material submitted was so lacking that detailed feedback would be a monologue rather than a dialogue. Receives: 0% of points
Basically, for every assignment you submit, you can get an F, D, B, or A. But because I’m interested in feedback and iterative change, any check-graded assignment can be corrected and resubmitted for a newer grade, as long as it’s resubmitted by the end of the week it’s returned. Which is nice because it forces me to return work on Monday or Tuesday.
It also works recursively. Turn in an assignment, get it returned. Correct the assignment, get it returned. Correct the assignment, get it returned. It’s not only choose-your-own-due-date, but choose-your-own-grade, since you can keep submitting a project until your grade is where you want it.
How’d it all work?
In short, like it was supposed to, mostly. Let’s break it down into the due dates and the grading.
For the due dates, there was some legwork to get everything set up in Excel. But students who would normally follow due dates followed their own due dates, and students who have trouble with due dates had trouble with due dates. I think that fewer students had trouble following the due dates this semester, but I’m not quite sure. Students who totally missed due dates who came to me during the last weeks of the semester were given (or rather, just had) the opportunity to edit their semester plan, so nothing was technically late.
Some of the Skills for Academic Success students were pretty lackadaisical about due dates–they were close, -ish. I’m chalking that up to COVID.
My intention this semester was to have sample due dates available as part of the assignment slates in Entrepreneurship (for those students not wanting to pick their projects a la carte). I didn’t get to that for the fall, but I’ve updated that for the spring.
The big thing that comes up when I tell people I let students pick their own due dates is that everyone will just pick the end of the semester. They really don’t. Maybe they’ll pick the end of the semester for a major project, but otherwise they’ll pick reasonable due dates.
Due dates didn’t surprise me too much. I’d do it again.
Grading, on the other hand, that kind of surprised me.
What surprised me in one sense is that it removed the middle from my classes. There were students who did nothing, and there were students with full credit, and almost nobody in the middle. Then I realized that with the resubmission process, this is how it should look. Then it corrected itself as the semester went on, which was even more surprising. The occasional student took advantage of grade re-submission, but not as many as should have. The class probably should have generated a bunch of As and Fs. There was a bit of a middle.
Students generally turn in acceptable work or none at all. This is probably due in part to the fact that I only used this grading scheme for creative classes, i.e., there are no wrong answers. But if asked to write a bio for the first time, or write up a travel budget, they do satisfactory work. Or none.
The idea of doing no work baffles me, and I have no correction for it.
I’ll probably keep the grading scheme for this spring too, but I’m not totally convinced of it yet.
I did a lot of nonsense teaching things last semester. Or rather, things that seem like nonsense, but that are grounded in my composition/creative and programmer/system-building tendencies. Some of these things worked. This is part 2 in a multi-part series I have thus far not forgotten about.(part 1: Late Work Passes)
MUSC 385: Music Entrepreneurship
When I started teaching at NDSU, I inherited a class entitled Music Entrepreneurship. It’s always one of my favorites, and each class is its own unique collection of weirdness. But I’ve never quite been content with the curriculum.
The class started as an upper-division elective for our performance and general music students (excluding music education majors, since their schedule doesn’t normally allow for electives). However, at some point before I got here, it became a required class in the music curriculum. As in, all of the music majors.
I should stop here for a moment and point out how great this is–when I go to conferences and we talk about our teaching loads, everyone wants a required music entrepreneurship course. (They also want a required freshman “how to be a music major” class, but we’ll get to that in a second). But the projects, initially designed for final-year or last-semester enrichment, eventually became a part of a mandatory course that students take as early as their third semester. Building a website is a terrific skill for a motivated young performer about to enter grad school or the job market, but the battle with younger students (especially of the music ed variety) is that they don’t see the immediate relevance or utility of the project. Which is too bad, because *looks around* I have strong opinions on web design.
That’s one example–several other projects resulted the same way. Some I inherited with the course, and some I invented. A feature of the original class was a substantial (~40%) final project of the student’s choosing, which again worked great for motivated students, but less so for our less experienced ones.
For fall 2020, I decided to change up the class. I’d keep the successful projects that were immediately relevant, and I’d make the other projects optional. Out of 10,000 points, half would be required, and the other half would be up to the student, picking from a smorgasbord of options.
For required projects, I had the following:
1. Semester Plan–Map out your optional projects, and pick your due dates. That’s right–you get to pick when you’re submitting your optional projects. 2. Job Search–Find three job postings that you’d apply for. 3. Job Interview–Create your job materials (CV, Cover Letter, and Bio) and participate in a mock job interview. 4. Taxes (Schedule C)–Calculate your self-employed musician income and expenses 5. Travel Funding–Plan a trip to a conference or performance, make a budget, and fill out a funding request form. 6. Recording–Record an excerpt three times in different ways.
These were the most successful required projects from earlier semesters, paired with a Semester Plan project. Then, I gave them some options for optional projects:
A. Written Review of Chapter, Guest Speaker, or Podcast episode (repeatable) 100pts
B. Cold Call (repeatable) 100pts
C. Return an unused Late Work Pass (repeatable) 250pts
D. Apply to a Competition or Contest (repeatable) 500pts
E. Start or Invest in an IRA 500pts
F. Apply for a grant (repeatable) 750pts
G. Create a Website 750pts
H. Volunteer with a nonprofit (repeatable) 1,000pts
I. Be a freshman mentor (Fall terms, Juniors and below) 1,000pts
J. Find a professional mentor 1,500pts
K. Create a comprehensive recruitment plan (band, choir, studio) 2,000pts
L. Create a Teaching Portfolio w/video 2,000pts
M. Create a Composition Portfolio w/performances 2,000pts
N. Record a CD or Album (repeatable) 3,500pts
O. Crowdfunding/Patreon 3,500pts
P. Execute an Outreach Performance (repeatable) 4,000pts
Q. Start a teaching studio with >2 students 4,000pts
R. Create Video/Audio/Print resources for future students (proposal req.) 1,000-4,000pts
S. Student-directed Project (proposal req.) Variable pts
Some notes:
Required projects across my classes are given numbers, while optional projects are given letters. We’ll see this again for 189 shortly.
Some projects are repeatable, meaning you can do them as many times as you like. For example, C-Return a LWP worked great this semester since I instituted “Covid Tests for LWPs” halfway through the semester. Or if they found them in the trash.
I totally messed up Project F (never writing the actual “apply for a grant” instructions, and instead just copying the Project A instructions). This gave some students a point boost, since I felt I needed to conform to the published version.
It feels like I’ve been writing a while. Here’s a cat picture:
If students found themselves to be completely overwhelmed or uncreative, they could also choose from a number of pre-formed Assignment Slates:
Custom Choose 5,000 points from the above projects.
Classroom Education: Teaching Portfolio (2,000) Comprehensive Recruitment Plan (2,000) Seven Written Reviews (100 x 7) Three Cold Calls (100 x 3)
Studio Education: Start a teaching studio (4,000) Create a website (750) Three Cold Calls (100 x 3)
Composition: Composition Portfolio (2,000) Create a Website (750) Two Competition Submissions (500 x 2) Volunteer with a Nonprofit (1,000) Three Written Reviews (100 x 3)
Arts Administration: Three Volunteer Nonprofits (1,000 x 3) Find a Professional Mentor (1,500) Five Written Reviews (100 x 5)
Performance: Website (750) Outreach (4,000) Three Written Reviews (100 x 3)
They still needed to pick their due dates, though, since time management is such an important skill as a musician.
Some of these projects are all-or-nothing projects: Plan an outreach performance (P) and bomb it, that’s 40% of your grade right there. Some projects are small, like cold calls (B) and chapter reviews (A). And if students are particularly creative, they can propose their own projects.
I played around with the idea of having points gain interest, so that projects done at the beginning of the semester would be worth more. I still like the idea (it’ll help with my end-of-semester grading) but I can barely get Blackboard to work with this grading scheme as it is, much less if I were to try to use Grade Center to compound interest. I’d have to build my own Learning Management System for that.
And I still might.
Oh, and I should mention that while optional projects can enrich things going on in other classes, I avoid things counting double. For example, you can’t count your recital as an outreach performance. You can record your recital repertoire in album form and release it online, because that’s not a requirement of the recital experience.
So how’d this thing work? Overall, really well.
The majority of students picked their projects, executed them, and turned them in with the due dates they created. Their projects and experiences were relevant to their career goals and experiences.
Some students got to the end of the semester and realized that they had done nothing, and it was here that I had to tell them about a rather brilliant loophole built into the system: Once you file your semester plan (1), it can be changed at any time in writing, no LWP required. So if you were planning on doing an outreach performance, and it falls through at the last minute, you can file a new semester plan with new projects. This changed the conversation at the end of the semester to “Well, you gotta have 9000 points for an A, 8000 for a B, and so on…You have the list of optional projects, make a plan and file it and I’ll grade what you submit.”
Some project observations:
Grant Applications didn’t really happen this year, partially due to COVID–that project may also need some revision.
Nonprofit volunteering–ditto.
Several students picked professional mentors, and some of them had some rude awakenings about being a professional musician–things we tell them, but it finally hits them when a professional they seek out tells them. Things about practice and networking, etc.
I insist on proper copyright clearances for the album creation project, which in my mind indicates that students should record works in the public domain. Students this semester misunderstood, and just created all their own music. Which is way more work.
For next semester, I think the only thing I’m going to tweak is going back to making part of the book required–possibly having an extra 1000 mandatory points through 10 book chapters from Beeching’s Beyond Talent.
Meanwhile, this sort of structure wouldn’t work well for 189.
MUSC 189: Skills for Academic Success.
Another class I inherited at NDSU is our “welcome to being a music major” class. Sometime before I came north, the class was required of all NDSU freshman as UNIV 189, and when it was discontinued university-wide we decided to keep it in music. The first two years I used Daniel Coyle’s The Talent Code, a great book but not quite well-formatted for our purposes. And the assignments were generally chapter reviews, which aren’t necessarily the most interesting.
I’d already thought of the Entrepreneurship curriculum, and I knew I definitely didn’t want students picking their own projects, that would be madness. But I did want them to have some form of autonomy. So I picked the following projects:
1. Create a Semester Plan (required first project)
B. Submit the Musician Personality Inventory
C. Create a Weekly Plan/Schedule
D. Read and Review Klickstein Chapter 1: Getting Organized
E. Assemble Your Personal Cabinet
F. Read and Review Klickstein Chapter 2: Practicing Deeply 1
G. Create a Practice Plan/Log
H. Interview an Upperclassman/Mentorship
I. Read and Review Klickstein Chapter 7: Unmasking Performance Anxiety
J. Music Website Scavenger Hunt
K. Read and Review Klickstein Chapter 12: Injury Prevention 1
L. Visit Resources across Campus
M. Have an Advising Meeting for the Spring Semester
N. Read and Review Klickstein Chapter 14: Succeeding as a Student
15. Submit an end-of-semester review
Each project is worth 100 points, and the class is made up of 2000 points total. The remaining 500 points are attendance-based.
All projects are mandatory, but the lettered projects are optional in their order. Students will (or should) complete all 15 projects, but weeks 2-14 are up to them. Like Entrepreneurship, the first project is writing a semester plan to pick due dates. Students are gently reminded that they should look at their other class schedules, and maybe do some of the easier projects during weeks where they have other assignments due.
Oh, and one project is due per week. This was obvious in the course materials. It will need to be obviouser.
What I like about this project is that it combines things they should already be doing (creating a schedule, a practice plan, talking with upperclassmen) with things they might not do on their own (Creating a personal cabinet [their “academic success team”], visiting resources on campus, finding stuff on the music website). It also ties in with several chapters from The Musician’s Way by Gerald Klickstein.
I forward this curriculum to the music faculty, so they can be involved in this process if they’d like. Since we only get to five chapters in The Musician’s Way, there are plenty more to cover in lessons, studio classes, or future semesters (including in Music Entrepreneurship).
Some reflections on this setup:
Student choice either led to drastically improved investment in the class, or the usual inaction. Most students who would be kind of “meh” about the class ended up being more invested.
There’s enough to say about “choose your own deadlines” that I’ll write an entire other post about that.
Given that everyone is doing their own thing, lecture planning is, simply, hard. Entrepreneurship works alright, since there’s enough required projects to keep structure. For 189 though, everyone was doing their own thing, so much of what we discussed in class was centered around what was going on at NDSU or in the Challey School of Music, and answering questions that came up.
Overall, I plan to keep it in the Spring for Entrepreneurship, and maybe tweaking it for 189.
I did a lot of nonsense teaching things this semester. Or rather, things that seem like nonsense, but that are grounded in my composition/creative and programmer/system-building tendencies. Some of these things worked.Part 1 in a multi-part series I will probably forget to update in about January.
I hate late work, but I’m no good at being mean. So I decided I needed to figure out some sort of system to get around both those things.
While I was in Oklahoma, I heard of a class–I think it was a gen-ed class, and I think it was economics, or poly sci, or some such thing–where you had to have something outrageous like 10,000 points worth of participation. Rather than keep track of this, the instructor would come to class every day with a fat stack of printed-off participation points in 100-point notes. He’d ask who had insights on the chapter, students would crawl over each other to answer the question, and he’d make it rain. Students then just had to turn in enough points they had gained through the semester.
As it turns out, people like stuff.
For the spring, I made two changes to my late work policy. The first was that most of my due dates were early in the week–Monday or Tuesday. But my late work policy was that I would accept all work through the end of the calendar week. If students wanted to think of the assignment as being due on Monday/Tuesday, that was fine, and that’s what Blackboard showed as the due date. If students wanted to think of the due date as being Saturday at 11:59, that’s fine too. Blackboard would show it as being late, but whatever; Blackboard has a tendency to do whatever it wants anyway.
The idea was and is that there’s a built-in cushion in case things come up. Because as music majors, things always come up.
The other thing I did was create physical late work passes (LWPs). Here’s what they look like.
I designed the front and back in Paint.net and had them printed up by Moo, using their Luxe business card template–32pt weight with a forest green color seam on the edge and rounded corners.
I designed the LWPs to be bearer instruments–I don’t track them, there are no serial numbers. If you physically have one, you can use it. The rules are pretty simple.
I can only say they’re usable in my classes.
It’s only good for one assignment.
You can’t use it outside of an academic term*
And some other stuff that might be on the syllabus (but currently isn’t).
I starred the academic term requirement. What I wanted to avoid is having students try to turn in late work after the end of the semester, so they go invalid at the end of finals week. But they reactivate at the beginning of the next term. Technically speaking, there’s no reason you couldn’t stockpile them.
I give one out to each student at the beginning of each course I teach. What I found myself doing in the Fall of 2020 was making the announcement that for every four COVID tests that students take, I would award them one LWP.
For Music Entrepreneurship in the Fall, I also included an optional project (more on the curriculum for that class later, it’s more nonsense) that was essentially an LWP buy-back. Turn in an LWP, get 250 points (repeatable).
What I expected to happen was that it would make my conversation with students easier–“Oh, you don’t have a late work pass? You can’t turn that in late.” What happened instead is far more interesting.
By and large, students just took ownership of keeping track of late work. Although I keep detailed records, it doesn’t really matter. Students didn’t even consider asking for an extension or if I’d accept late work. Although, this fell apart late in the Fall 2020 semester due to COVID and being online (especially with the freshmen), but in person, it has worked great.
If I were to do it again, I might go with wooden nickels–I think they’d be more durable, and in some cases, they’d also be cheaper.
