Mitchell Conservatorium – Face-To-Face Lessons Online

Transcript

• Mitchell Conservatorium – Face-To-Face Lessons Online

  If you don’t give them the distilled information, there will be a void and they’re gonna fill it from somewhere, and there are so many questionable sources of information at the moment.

  My name is Graham Sattler. I’m the executive director of Mitchell Conservatorium. Now Mitchell Conservatorium is a community owned and operated not-for-profit music education organization. The main part of our clientele is school aged children. But we also provide early childhood music and also recreational music education activities for adults, all the way through to pretty advanced seniors actually. Well over 90% of our business has been face-to-face.

  All of our ensemble activities are group activities. They were suspended around about 90 maybe 95, one to one students who have disengaged at this time for this period. We carried on after a week’s preparation time we carried on with all of those one-to-one tuition online, it would have been closer to 5 or 6% of the business that was online. So the majority of our staff and the majority of our clientele, we’re not familiar in any way, let alone intimately with online delivery.

  We’re pretty pleased that I guess that the action that we took as swiftly as we took and the amount of communication that we engaged in immediately, we believe that’s likely to have given us a fairly comparatively soft transition, the vast majority of responses, the vast majority of communication that we’ve had from the student body and the clientele has been positive. What I’m thrilled to say is that we have some of our staff, our music educators now who have become absolute experts at video delivery, there are a number of students who, as I’ve referred to before, have not only embraced this form of learning, but see advantages over the face-to-face. And that might be because of tyranny of distance. That might be because of scheduling. That could be all sorts of reasons. But this is opened up an opportunity for us.

  What’s been fantastic is that we can genuinely talk about and we have genuinely quoted with permission, of course, some unanticipated positives from the beginning, we’ve said this is not the same, it’s different. It is to our mind as valuable, and we will do everything in our power to maintain the value proposition. I consider that to be a fairly successful version of getting through to this point. Getting through this transition.