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Discussion – 

2

Discussion – 

2

Building a Better Piano Learning Experience

I am happy to announce the launch of the redesigned piano learning platform, a project that has grown incredibly close to my heart, even though at times it drove me crazy. As an educator, I’m constantly looking for ways to improve the learning experience for my students. However, when it came to turning my ideas into reality, which involved some kind of website development, I always felt very limited. So, this project also turned me into a student as I dove into the depths of website development to truly understand this digital space where we will connect.


Behind The Scenes

Over the past few months, I woke up every day with a clear task at hand, yet also with a sense of uncertainty about how to solve it—how to go from absolute zero to step one, such as adding text to a page. My ‘step one’ usually involved sitting in front of the computer for the next ten hours, diving deep into tutorial videos about the website builders I chose to use (Divi), as well as design, user experience, and coding, until things started to make sense. At least ten times, I had to completely reset the site and start from scratch because I had messed up so badly, often without any clear understanding of why. But once I truly committed to the work, the interesting experience (after the first seven days of absolute nightmare) was that I began to look forward to waking up and tackling something new that I had no idea how to handle at first. It seems you can indeed train yourself to do hard things—there’s probably already some science behind this.

So what does this mean for you? What are these new features?

New Features, New Possibilities

One of the biggest changes is the interface once you log in. We have almost 600 lessons, and on the old site while everything was divided into 13 modules, these modules were way too big; to complete one module course could easily take half a year or more. So I went through all the lessons one by one, and I reorganized them into smaller modules. So when you log in you will find 21 modules and each of them has around 25 to 40 lessons, so you can actually celebrate your wins much more often, declare victories more often, and feel some confidence that you can actually do this huge piano course, once everything is broken down into small chunks.

The other big change is that you can finally track your progress. Mark things complete, which not only helps you remember where you are at, but it is again a great motivation trigger to keep moving forward.

I think the biggest time consumer was actually to add proper guidance in the descriptions. If you’re coming from the old site you know that I used to give some simple practice plans like “play this exercise 5 times,” or “play this 2 times in a row correctly,” but now I went way beyond that, and explain a lot more things: what to expect from these lessons, why it is important to practice, how you can make the best out of it, what are common mistakes, what is the minimum requirement to move forward, music theory, personal stories, student stories, and so forth.

One last thing I want to mention is the introduction of brand new workbooks. Each module now comes with a workbook—except for Module 4, which focuses on experimentations with intervals and doesn’t require written music. However, it bothers me that we now have 21 modules but only 20 workbooks, so I’m considering developing one for Module 4 as well, though I’m still figuring out what to include in it!

This workbook feature was highly requested by many students. Instead of navigating to each lesson to download the corresponding sheet of music, they preferred having a complete workbook for each module where everything is included. Now, that’s a reality. From the very first lesson in each module, labeled ‘Start Here’ and ‘Lesson One,’ you can access the entire workbook in the Materials Section. It’s also simple to match each video with its corresponding music sheet since all the video lessons and workbook pages are numbered consistently—like Lesson 1, Lesson 2, and so forth.

I really hope all this time, effort, and love I put into this will translate for you to have more fun practicing piano, progress faster, and become the musician you want to be. The website is far from done; I have so much more ideas that I want to implement, but I wanted to make it public already, so I don’t feel so isolated anymore with this. So I encourage you to explore the new features and share your feedback, as I am still deep into improving every corner of the site, and your input will help us continue to refine and improve your learning experience.

David Magyel

2 Comments

  1. Chris Gibson

    Module 4: The White Album.

  2. David Magyel

    I like the idea! What about a beautiful cover with 30 blank white pages inside 🙂

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