Third post in a series. The August 2023 post covered latency measurements across six European research-network links. The June 2024 post covered what institutional infrastructure needs to look like for any of that to be sustainably usable. This one covers what happens after both of those problems are solved — which is when the genuinely interesting educational challenges start.

Based on a manuscript with colleagues from the RAPP Lab. Not yet peer-reviewed. Evidence and references checked through 2026-07-11. The account describes iterative curriculum work at HfMT Köln; it is not a controlled evaluation and does not establish causal learning outcomes or transfer.

The Gap Nobody Talks About

There is a version of the NMP success story that stops too early. It goes: we installed LoLa, measured the latency, it came in at 9.5 ms to Vienna, the musicians played together across 745 km, it worked. Success.

What this story skips is the classroom after the demo. The student who can follow a setup checklist perfectly and still has no idea what to do musically when the connection is stable. The ensemble that gets a clean signal running and then plays exactly the same repertoire in exactly the same way they would in a co-present rehearsal, fighting the latency instead of working with it, frustrated when it does not feel right. The assessment rubric that checks off “maintained stable connection” and “completed the performance” and has nothing to say about everything that actually constitutes musical learning in a networked context.

The gap between technical feasibility and the educational work we wanted is the subject of this post. The design below is one situated response, not evidence about what most conservatoires do.

What Gets Taught Versus What Needs to Be Learned

One curricular pattern we encountered treated NMP as a technical skill with an artistic application. Students learned to configure an audio interface, manage routing, establish a LoLa connection, and then — implicitly — go do music. The technical content was staged as a prerequisite to the “real” work.

For our aims, this ordering was limiting in a specific way. Technical setup is genuinely necessary, but making it a prerequisite treats the relationship between technology and musical practice as sequential rather than recursive. In practice, the interesting musical problems only become visible through the technical ones. A student does not understand why buffer size matters until they have felt the difference between a 5 ms and a 40 ms offset in a coordination-intensive passage. A student does not develop an opinion about audio routing configurations until they have experienced a rehearsal collapse caused by a routing error they could have prevented.

Our recurring interpretation across several years of module iterations at HfMT Köln was more direct: once learners can establish a stable connection, the harder challenge is developing artistic, collaborative and reflective strategies for making music together apart. Technical fluency became a foundation rather than the sole destination. That is a design interpretation from our records, not a comparative effect estimate.

The Curriculum We Ended Up With

It took several cycles to get there. The early format was weekend workshops — open, exploratory, no formal assessment, primarily for advanced students who self-selected in. These were useful precisely because they were informal: they made technical and musical questions visible together in practice. They also produced observations about where these self-selecting students got stuck; those observations are design input, not a representative needs assessment.

Over time, elements of those workshops were developed into recurring curriculum-embedded modules, which then fed into independent study projects and eventually into external collaborations and performances. Moving beyond a one-off event allowed teaching materials and documented strategies to carry across cohorts rather than being recreated for each event.

The module structure that emerged has three interlocking elements:

Progressive task design. Early sessions are tightly scoped: specific technical-musical exercises, limited repertoire, well-defined success criteria. Later sessions move toward open-ended projects, student-led rehearsal planning, and eventually cross-institutional partnerships where variables are genuinely outside anyone’s control. The point of the early constraints is not to make things easier — it is to create conditions where students can notice what they are doing rather than just surviving.

Journals and debriefs. Students kept individual reflective journals throughout modules, documenting not just what happened but how they responded to it — technical problems, musical decisions, moments of coordination failure and recovery, questions they could not answer at the time. Group debriefs after each rehearsal then turned those individual threads into collective knowledge: comparing strategies, naming the problems that came up repeatedly, developing shared language for rehearsal coordination.

The debrief is the part of this model that I think gets undervalued. It is not just reflection — it is curriculum production. Strategies that emerged from one cohort’s debriefs became documented starting points for subsequent cohorts. Knowledge accumulated rather than evaporating when the semester ended.

Portfolio assessment. Rather than assessing primarily on a final performance, students assembled portfolios that could include curated journal excerpts, rehearsal documentation, reflective syntheses, and accounts of how their thinking changed. The question being assessed was not “did you play the concert” but “can you articulate why you made the decisions you made, and what you would do differently.”

Four Themes We Observed

Four themes recurred in our curriculum records and debriefs. They are useful for design and assessment, but the project did not use a comparison group, validated outcome scales or a transfer test:

1. Technical agency

This is different from technical competence. Competence means you can follow a procedure. Agency means you understand the procedure well enough to deviate from it intelligently when something goes wrong — to diagnose what failed, generate a hypothesis about why, and try something different.

We interpreted a shift when some students stopped treating technical problems as interruptions to the music and started treating them as information about the system they were working inside. A dropout is not just an annoyance; it can be evidence to investigate where a failure occurred. Our records do not support a general time-to-learning estimate or a claim that documentation alone could never produce this understanding.

2. Adaptive improvisation

Latency changes what real-time musical coordination can mean. You cannot rely on the same multimodal cues — breath, gesture, shared acoustics — that make co-present ensemble playing feel intuitive. You have to develop explicit cueing systems, turn-taking conventions, contingency plans for when the connection degrades mid-performance.

What we observed was that this constraint generated a specific kind of musical creativity. Students improvised not just with musical material but with rehearsal organisation itself — inventing systems, testing them, discarding the ones that did not work, documenting the ones that did. Some of the most musically interesting moments in the modules came from sessions where the technology was behaving badly and students had to make it work anyway.

Research on “productive failure” compares carefully designed conditions and does not make every failure productive (Kapur 2016). It offers a useful lens for asking when NMP difficulties support later sense-making; our observations do not themselves test that mechanism.

3. Collaborative communication

Co-present rehearsal relies heavily on implicit communication: the physical space makes many things legible without anyone having to say them. In a networked rehearsal, the spatial and gestural channel is degraded or absent. Students had to make explicit what would normally be implicit — articulating coordination strategies, naming the problems they were experiencing rather than hoping the ensemble would notice, developing a vocabulary for talking about timing and latency as musical parameters.

Some students appeared to use the vocabulary in later co-present settings too. Because we did not conduct a transfer assessment, this remains an observation and hypothesis rather than a demonstrated generalisation.

4. Reflective identity

In the journals, some of the most developed reflections came from students who stopped waiting for the conditions to improve and started working with the conditions as they were. Latency as a compositional constraint rather than a defect to be routed around. Uncertainty as an artistic condition rather than a technical failure.

The journal entries where this shift is most visible are not the ones that describe what the student did. They are the ones that describe a change in how the student understands their own practice — who they are as a musician in relation to an environment they cannot fully control. That is a different kind of self-reported change that a timing metric does not capture; it is not, by itself, proof of a stable identity outcome.

The Assessment Problem

In our curriculum work, assessment was especially difficult to translate into institutional language. Existing performance frameworks did not by themselves make the reasoning before, between and underneath performances visible.

Checklist rubrics — was the connection stable, was the latency within acceptable range, did the performance complete — are useful for safety and reliability. They are poor evidence for whether a student has developed the capacity to work reflectively and artistically in a mediated ensemble environment. A student who achieved a stable connection by following instructions exactly and a student who achieved it by diagnosing a routing error mid-session look identical on a checklist. They have had very different learning experiences.

Portfolio assessment addresses this by making the reasoning visible. When a student can explain why they chose a particular buffer configuration given the specific network characteristics of that session, how that choice affected the musical phrasing in the piece they were rehearsing, and what they would change next time, the portfolio provides evidence about their stated reasoning. That evidence still requires criteria, interpretation and corroboration; we do not have comparative data about how commonly programmes use it.

The argument is not that quantitative indicators are useless. It is that they function better as scaffolding for reflective judgement than as the sole evidence of learning. We propose combining technical logs, journals and portfolio syntheses because each makes a different part of the process inspectable; the present account does not show that this mix is superior.

What This Does Not Solve

The model described here depends on teaching staff who can facilitate reflective dialogue, curate knowledge across cohorts, and participate in iterative curriculum redesign. That is a specific professional competence that is not automatically present in a conservatoire staffed primarily by performing musicians. The training and support structures needed to develop it are an open question this paper does not fully answer.

The curriculum is also not portable as-is. The RAPP Lab model emerged in a specific institutional context — HfMT Köln, specific partner network, specific funding structure and specific cohorts. The four themes and the general pedagogical logic are hypotheses for transfer, not established portable outcomes. Other institutions would need to adapt and evaluate the formats in their own context.

And the technology keeps moving. LoLa is a mature platform but the ecosystem around it — network configurations, operating system support, hardware lifecycles — changes faster than curriculum documentation. Building responsiveness into the curriculum itself, rather than treating it as a fixed syllabus, is our design recommendation. It remains to be evaluated.

References

Barrett, H. C. (2007). Researching electronic portfolios and learner engagement. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 50(6), 436–449.

Borgdorff, H. (2012). The Conflict of the Faculties. Leiden University Press.

The Design-Based Research Collective (2003). Design-based research: An emerging paradigm for educational inquiry. Educational Researcher, 32(1), 5–8.

Kapur, M. (2016). Examining productive failure, productive success, unproductive failure, and unproductive success in learning. Educational Psychologist, 51(2), 289–299. https://doi.org/10.1080/00461520.2016.1155457

Lave, J. & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated Learning. Cambridge University Press.

Sadler, D. R. (2009). Indeterminacy in the use of preset criteria for assessment and grading. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 34(2), 159–179. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602930801956059

Schön, D. A. (1983). The Reflective Practitioner. Basic Books.

Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of Practice. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511803932

Changelog

  • 2026-07-11: Recast the four learning “outcomes” as themes from a situated, non-comparative curriculum account; removed unsupported time-to-learning, transfer and sector-wide assessment claims.
  • 2026-01-20: Updated the Sadler (2009) reference title to “Indeterminacy in the use of preset criteria for assessment and grading,” matching the journal article at this DOI. Updated the Kapur (2016) reference to the full published title: “Examining productive failure, productive success, unproductive failure, and unproductive success in learning.”