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Originally Posted by morgan1611
Has anyone here earned a B.A. in music from T.E. or Excelsior? I've been working on Cleps for some basic courses, but of course I want to take ones that will apply. I plan to portfolio a lot of the music specific courses. Just wondered if anyone had been down this road and had some advice.
Thanks!
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I've looked at it. You'll find that it's a lot harder to find courses for a standard music curriculum than say, psychology or business. While online music theory courses exist, they are not necessarily easy to find, are expensive, or not offered on a regular basis. Traditional music history courses (Antiquity through 20-century) are available. Ohio University has two courses, Excelsior has a new one-semseter course, and Athabasca has a new course. Athabasca also has upper-level courses on folk and popular music if you are interested. Berklee also has several courses that would apply toward a music major, but is fairly expensive.
There are lots of DL upper-level courses in Jazz, Jazz History and American Music on the web. Fort Hayes State University seems to offer these courses on a regular basis, but many others schools also offer these courses.
You might want to look at MIT's Opencourseware:
Free Online MIT Course Materials | Music and Theater Arts | MIT OpenCourseWare to provide some structure to your portfolio. You could actually follow the syllabus and assignments for these courses on your own and attempt a portfolio based on that work.
One problem you can run into at Excelsior is their upper-level requirement. They require 15 semester hours at the 300-level or above. In my opinion it would be difficult to complete their requirements for a major in music in just 30 semester hours if fifteen of those have to be at the upper level. It is not unusual for a school to require 20 to 30 hours of specific music courses to enroll in upper-level courses. Tesc, of course, defines upper-level differently and you would not have to take 300 or 400-level courses. With almost fifty semester hours in music I've completed all the requirements for a major at Tesc, but would actually have a ways to go to meet Excelsior's upper level requirement.
Also keep in mind that some of the 300-400-level DL music courses out there could easily be treated as lower-level by Excelsior. Many of the upper-level DL courses I've found have no music prerequisites or are not open to music majors at the school offering the course.
I believe that a music degree from Tesc is more accessible because of Excelsior's upper-level requirement. Coach Turner on Degreeinfo is probably the resident expert in DL circles on music degrees. Maybe you could ask him over there.