Musica Viva In Schools Platform Enhancements

About Musica Viva: Long live music

Musica Viva has been using the power of music to enrich the lives of Australians since 1945. Founded by Richard Goldner with the sole purpose to make Australia a more musical place. His vision was to create a musical culture based on creativity and imagination – one that enriches communities and makes the magic of music accessible to everyone.

Since then, Musica Viva has turned into the world’s largest presenter of chamber music, reaching over 360,000 people directly each year.

Today, they are at the forefront of artist development – inspiring musicians and audiences alike in a shared passion for ensemble music of quality, diversity, challenge and joy.

Musica Viva In Schools: The role of music in education

Realising the power of music in education, Musica Viva is also focused on improving educational outcomes for children. 

For over 35 years, it has been bringing live music to schools and students around the country. Over 900 schools and over 260,000 kindergarten to year 8 students get to experience life-changing music education every year through the organisation. They specialise in bringing the best nationally and internationally acclaimed performers direct to schools: interactive, dynamic and culturally diverse groups that perform a wide variety of musical styles.

Embracing digital technology to spread the love of music

Musica Viva is driven to reach a wider audience, no matter the type of school, location or economic situation, providing life-changing musical education and experience to teachers and students alike, and giving students the opportunity to discover live music, in their own unique way.

They wanted to make music easily accessible for teachers and students, through the use of digital technology.  As a result of this desire, Musica Viva developed an online platform where generalist and specialist teachers could access online resources tailored to the live performance, including ready-made lessons plans for up to 10 weeks. Students and teachers can also access interactive music activities, video demonstrations by the musicians, and much more.

While the promise of the new online platform was exciting, they faced a number of issues with the first iteration of the platform. After experiencing some performance issues and a desire to build new interactive features, Musica Viva reached out to us to see if we could bridge the gap between the promise of technology and reality.

Functionality and security a priority

The most important initial goal for Musica Viva was to ensure the platform was functioning correctly and securely. We took a phased approach to this project and focused on functionality and security first. 

After an extensive review and audit of technology, strategy and code, we developed a two-year roadmap to fix the issues and improve the platform’s capabilities. 

Over the next 12 months, we rolled out fixes to functionality and security and implemented features that should’ve been available from day one.

Better user experiences all around

In the next phase of the project, improving the teacher and student experience was top priority. 

One priority for the teaching experience was to be able to customise the entry of content into the platform. The content management system was built in a way that didn’t allow for any flexibility. The CMS is now ‘loosened up’, allowing admin users to customise the arrangement of content within the platform. 

Streamlining the content flowed into a re-design of the overall look and feel of the platform, which was designed in-house (??) by the Leafcutter team. In consultation with Musica Viva’s education and marketing teams, we were able to remove design aspects which were hindering teachers’ use of the teaching content. 

One of the key issues around student access,  uncovered during a Discovery Session with Musica Viva, was the login process. Each student was allocated an email login, which was not ideal in the classroom setting, and was also not ideal for the user creating student logins. The existing process for creating student logins, where each student had to be individually imported, was a manual process and incredibly time-consuming. 

We took this issue and developed a simple process, where students can now log in using a single classroom code determined by the teacher – eliminating the need for manual import and creating a seamless experience for students in the classroom.

Better digital solutions for improved satisfaction

Musica Viva haves been really pleased with the results so far. It’s early days, but they’re already seeing a satisfaction rate increase to 80-90% as a result of the first phase of development and have received some really positive anecdotal feedback after releasing part of the second phase of development. 

“Working with Leafcutter has allowed us to make our educational dreams a digital reality. They have been instrumental in updating our user platform to allow for a seamless teacher, student and admin experience. They have taken the time and care to understand what we do as an organisation, and what our specific needs are in the education space, and we are thrilled to call Leafcutter our digital partners.

Wrapping Up

We’re passionate about helping organisations like Musica Viva make the best of digital technology. Whether it’s starting from scratch or picking up and improving your existing web applications – our experience with the NFP sector and expertise in digital solutions mean we can deliver robust technology that enables seamless experiences.