Amid the coronavirus pandemic situation, the Finnish nation came to a very strong halt beginning in mid-March 2020. Luckily enough, the nation-wide network of Finnish music institutes was capable to continue giving education in music to students around the country.
The teaching had to be transformed from contact teaching to online teaching overnight. This was made possible by the huge amount of work by the teachers and the administration personnel in the music institutes around the country.
Musicologist Hanna Isolammi interviewed me and plenty of my colleagues for her article to Finnish Music Quarterly about the online teaching, its benefits, challenges and our views on the possible future implementation of digital devices in teaching.
The past weeks have surely been full of work in order to get things going on as smoothly as possible. The positive side is that technology has its benefits in teaching composition, and the current shutdown situation has been a valuable period of time in making notes of the devices and applications available for teaching at the moment.
While technology and online teaching has its benefits, it's important to remember that online teaching is a fine addition to the traditional teaching practices. As I state in the interview, something in the human interaction remains lacking when the people are not meeting each other in the real life: "Even if you have a video link, any remote communication has a distancing element to it. The natural mode of human interaction is meeting in person, not via technology."