Paper Title
Using Distant Learning Platform for Musical Instrument Teaching: Akadema

Abstract
The purpose of this study is about a research on the musicalinstrumenteducationprogram which is a part of Anadolu University’s online distant learning platformcalledAKADEMA. Music education, especially learning how to play musical instruments, has been one of the major topics of general education. Today, formal musical instrument education is available in conservatories and music departments of fine arts and education colleges, and informal or non-formal musical instrument education is available in private music schools and courses in many countries including Turkey. In Turkey also, recorder or harmonica is taught in public schools as part of the general music education. The face-to-face individual lessons are the major and popular instructional strategy in teaching instruments. However, not only in Turkey but also in the world very little number of people has chance to obtain instrument lessons. There have been different strategies for spreading musical instrument education. One of them is online learning. There are various applications of online instrument education. For exampleBerklee School of Music, Northwestern University and University of North Carolina have been offering courses over Coursera (a major MOOCs provider), such as Introduction to Guitar, Teaching Violin and Viola, Fundamentals of Rehearsing Music Ensembles, most of them do not include actual playing. A group of well-educated professional instructors of the Anadolu University including myself established a distant musical instrument learning program. Anadolu University has the advantage of having the largest distant learning program in Turkey. This paper will explain and explore the stages of the program’s creation and how many courses generate the program. Keywords - Instrument, Teaching, Learning, Distant Learning, Musical Instruments