A Chat with Artusi’s VPs of Technology, Marketing, and User Experience

This is a follow-up to my review of Artusi, an interactive music theory and aural skills textbook. I wanted to learn more about this company’s approach to design and pedagogy, so I chatted with Joseph VanderStel (Vice President of Technology) and Julia Cavallaro (Vice President of Marketing & User Experience) about Artusi’s history, its mission, and where they are headed next.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Origins and the Pandemic

We began our chat by exploring the company’s origins, and its mission, and the ways remote education during the COVID-19 pandemic led to a massive increase in Artusi’s user base.

In March [2020] there were thousands of people signing up for Artusi looking for resources. […] I don’t think the mission of Artusi has changed. I think the demand for tools like this has changed. When it became clear that like they needed to have a remote teaching option and there was no other option, people flocked to Artusi and other tools like it.

- Julia Cavallaro

How has your relationship with Artusi evolved through the pandemic? How do you see the pandemic experience in emerging from it?

Julia: In March of 2020, a lot of schools went into spring break thinking they’d postpone any decision about what they would do in response to COVID until after Spring break. It became clear the entire country was going to go into lockdown to minimize the surge. And a lot of schools just never went back to in-person teaching after spring break. It was those first couple of weeks of March that there were thousands of people signing up for Artusi looking for resources.

Has the pandemic changed the core mission of Artusi?

Julia: I don’t think the mission of Artusi has changed. I think the demand for tools like this has changed. A lot of people probably had resistance to change because change is difficult. When it became clear that they needed to have a remote teaching option and there was no other option, people flocked to Artusi and other tools like it.

The initial learning curve of transitioning from traditional pen and paper tools to online or digital ones was made easier because the pandemic removed the barrier that was previously standing in people’s way. Once they were forced to do that in the first wave, it became clear this is actually much better, easier, and gives students a better learning experience. A lot of people who started with us in that first semester of the pandemic stayed with Artusi, and are still with us, two, three years later.

Joseph: I would agree with Julia. I don't think the core mission of the company has changed any significant way. Our mission is really composed of two things. On the one hand, Artusi frees up instructors’ time and make it easier for them to focus on the more interesting aspects of their pedagogy, leaving the rudiments to the computer. That's from the instructor angle.

From the student angle, the mission is to reduce or condense the feedback cycle that students engage in during their courses. Typically with pen and paper assignments, you're getting feedback back in a week. With Artusi it can be just a second, allowing you to iterate on the same type of exercise much more quickly and scale your fluency much more rapidly. As far as I'm concerned, those have been the two core foundations of the company's mission. And that's been the case since the very beginning.

Julia: Students are progressing more quickly because they're getting feedback immediately. They're learning the fundamentals more thoroughly and faster. They're getting to more interesting things more quickly. So by the end of first semester of theory, instead of continuing to do spelling exercises and drills, [educators] can actually give them short composition assignments like model compositions, write your own pop song, or take this chord progression and turn it into something. It's really fun to see what professors have come up with because they're not spending all that time just like marking papers.

Are you able to share like an estimate of how many schools or instructors or students are using Artusi?

Julia: Maybe 30,000 or something users.

Five digit users, meaning like what you're in the three digits in terms of educators using it?

Joseph: Probably four digits.

Artusi’s Design Language

I was interested to learn more about the design decisions involved in Artusi’s development. I was particularly interested to learn how team team balanced pedagogical and technical considerations, given how resource-intensive interface development can be.

We make it as similar to a piece of paper as as possible, short of having the punch holes on the left hand side, to be kind of a similar experience for the student. That paradigm is unique to Artusi.

- Joseph VanderStel

I see there's two worlds in Artusi’s design language. There’s the linear scrolling down the page, textbook/worksheet style, and then there's this horizontal, gamified drill screen. Tell me more about Artusi’s navigation style.

Joseph: This is a fundamental design decision that was made early on in the history of Artusi, which was to present questions in what we call the worksheet paradigm. Which to you is the vertical paradigm where you're scrolling down a webpage, seeing one question after another, very much like you would in a standard pen and paper exam.

Julia: It was meant to be a self grading piece of paper, essentially.

Joseph: Essentially. We try to make it as similar to a piece of paper as as possible, short of having the punch holes on the left hand side, to be kind of a similar experience for the student. That paradigm is unique to Artusi.

Most of the applications you see online or native applications like Auralia, are the horizontal drill and practice paradigm, which was pioneered in applications like MacGAMUT. Anne (Anne K. Blombach) was really the first to pioneer the style where you are presented with a series of questions in a logical order with the goal of achieving what she'd called mastery, and what we call fluency in Artusi. The idea being that students, if they struggle with a particular skill, can continue to drill that skill until they've achieved fluency.

In my own course design, I want to make sure students on both ends of the experience spectrum are accounted for. How does Artusi achieve that?

Joseph: At Artusi, we've talked about a couple of different strategies. We have this concept of an assignment being a single page with a succession of questions. Each assignment is broken up into a set of sections. Each section targets a specific exercise like interval identification.

There's a way as an instructor to create a benchmark per section where after a certain number of mistakes that a student makes, that section will light up and it'll say “Hey, we noticed that in this particular section you seem to be struggling with the skill.” Then we say “Click this button, you can restart the assignment if you want.”

We've talked about the idea of having an option to drill that specific skill and to have a drill actually appear in the page itself. So you're merging these two worlds that you mentioned: the horizontal and the vertical.

If a student's struggling with a specific skill within the assignment, they can open up a drill and can continue working on it until they've achieved fluency. At that point,  that orange banner that we display would disappear and would say, “Congratulations, you've achieved fluency. Move on to the next thing.” That's just one way that we could account for students who are struggling with a specific skill.

I really like how Artusi balances pre-built materials with a sandbox environment. How do you manage this from a pedagogical design perspective?

Because instructors have so many pressures and so many demands on their time, they actually prioritize things being pre-built, over being customizable.

- Julia Cavallaro

Julia: The initial goal was to give the instructor all the tools they would need to build their own worksheets. It was always designed to be infinitely customizable. Over time, we found that because instructors have so many pressures and so many demands on their time, they actually prioritize things being pre-built, over being customizable. They really value the fundamentals textbook that we've written and the worksheets that go with it because they're ready to use. They don’t have to think about how they're going to order the material, how they're going to present it.

The idea that you could customize the worksheet on a daily basis or weekly basis to match what your students need was always there in Artusi. If they're really struggling one week with intervals, you could just stick with that. This idea of pre-building content has been a huge help to the adjunct faculty person who has too many demands on their time and no teaching assistants. On the other hand, students have the ability to self-direct their work.

Learning How to Use Artusi

Artusi is quite easy to get into, but I have personally avoided some of the more advanced features because I haven’t had time to explore them fully. I wanted to learn more about Artusi’s approach to onboarding and documentation.

With such a big user pool and a small team and with so many different capabilities, how do you educate people on how to use the platform? Do you leave it up for to folks to explore it? Are there instructional materials built-in to Artusi? How do you navigate it?

I like that experience of having a personal relationship with a lot of our clients and it helps us build relationships and understand the individual needs of schools. […] We take the approach of wanting to meet people and build relationships.

-Julia Cavallaro

It’s a more expensive approach, but in the long run it’s way more valuable for everybody because we’re building these relationships.

- Joseph VanderStel

Julia: Yeah, that's such a good question. I do a lot of this myself personally and also handle all of the support desk questions. A year or two ago we realized that onboarding was very overwhelming for instructors. Once you sign up, instructors were presented with so many options. And then within those options, so many levels of customization.

Joseph built an instructor experience pathway that would guide them through the process slowly so they would be less overwhelmed. Now, instead of just being presented with a whole bunch of instructor tools and a sandbox to play with, there's a guided process where it prompts you to review the Artusi curriculum and see what is here ready to use, and what can be customized further. Essentially it doesn't require you to do any customization of the preexisting curriculum.

The other thing we still do as much as possible in the instructor’s journey is to prompt them to meet online with me, face-to-face. I meet with people multiple times on Zoom to go through and walk them through this process that they could do on their own. Sometimes it just takes somebody sitting with them and showing them what the options are and clicking the buttons. Once we've gone through it together on Zoom, they have the confidence to then go off on their own. Usually that's all it really takes: either 30 minutes or an hour to go sit with someone. And then they have the skills and the tools to do everything on their own.

I think it's a difference of learning styles or just like individual personalities, how instructors approach it. We’re also working on documentation in the form of video tutorials, which will give you the basics. It'll essentially replace that face-to-face meeting with me on Zoom.

We're a small team and I spend a lot of my time on Zoom face-to-face with instructors. I like that experience of having a personal relationship with a lot of our clients. It helps us build relationships and understand the individual needs of schools. And we get a lot of great feedback that way. But a lot of people would rather just watch a video, they're not as social as I am. They don't want to get on Zoom, they're tired of Zoom, or they want to do it at three in the morning when I'm asleep. They just want watch a YouTube video about how to use Artusi. That's our next big thing.

Joseph: I think there are sort of two extremes you can take as a digital company where you're onboarding users to new software. One approach is to have really good documentation, or an FAQ page where a user or a potential user can get their questions answered without interaction with anybody. A lot of software takes this approach. We take the approach of wanting to meet people and build relationships. It’s a more expensive approach, but in the long run it’s way more valuable for everybody because we’re building these relationships.

What we’ve decided to do is offer users the flexibility of having great documentation and having their questions answered there, but also nudge instructors to meet with Julia one-on-on and get their questions answered in a more direct way. You can get your question answered immediately, even if it’s a very specific question about a very specific part of Artusi that for whatever reason we don't have in our documentation.

I’m on the consumer end of a lot of things, and use software that I’m not an expert in. I really value having that choice, so for us giving instructors flexibility and freedom is really important.

Building Online Communities

Has your team considered adding a community forum-like element? Other software platforms have an open space where folks can talk about using the software. Community in two senses, one support and two content. What would happen if Artusi if folks could create their own worksheets, textbooks using the platform and then sharing it with others?

Julia: It's definitely come up in our conversations and predates me at Artusi. Early-on, there was an idea that Artusi might be more of a platform and forum where instructors would share their own curriculum materials and have the opportunity to share materials back and forth. Some of that is still reflected in the version of Artusi that we have now. It’s extremely easy to share your materials between colleagues, not just within the same institution. You could share your course with anybody that you as the instructor give permission to. The broader question about whether or not to have a discussion forum has definitely come up. Clients have mentioned it to us a lot of times. It's something that we've talked about a lot as a team.

Our main hesitation was the question of who would moderate it.  How would we monitor what was going on? The unfortunate reality of online forums being a place where people feel free to have not appropriate behavior. How do we anticipate that that might inevitably happen, and make sure that we are staffed and can catch those situations before someone gets hurt?

I think that was the main hesitation about it. But the idea of it has always been something I think that appeals to the team. The question is more in the execution of it. I know how popular forums are for other music notation tools and digital products where you can get almost any of your questions answered just by going to previous conversations.

Joseph: Another barrier is just like Julia said, we're a small team and it's a non-trivial task to build forum. Even if we import some third party library that does most of the boilerplate work for us, there's still the tech infrastructure that would be an issue. Because we're such a small and fast-paced company, we're constantly rolling out new features. Every hour of our time spent, we could either spend an hour of our time building a forum, or we could spend it on something that we've had 50 requests to build. In that case, there's a direct payoff and we know there's a direct value added to our instructors. With the forum, there’s certainly value added, but it's more intangible and it's a longer term project I think. In most cases there’s a short term fire that needs to be put out, or something that’s really in high demand that makes more sense to invest our time in.

I was curious about the different textbooks Artusi has that are written by different authors that introduce things slightly differently. I wonder if adding a more robust community element would help with this.

Julia: I know an instructor also who's using the Aural Skills textbook, and she teaches la-based minor, which I think makes a lot of sense. It's relatively straightforward to just customize what is there and redo the solfege syllables. She was thinking “well I've rewritten this whole section, I could share this with my colleagues and save them a lot of time". I know some instructors are already doing that because it's easy to share things across Artusi.

Takeaways

Clear Design Vision

Artusi’s design balances pedagogical needs with technological concerns and represents a good balance of usability and depth. I appreciated how clearly Julia and Joseph articulated the decision-making process for Artusi’s development. I am impressed with what they have achieved with a (relatively) small team.

Responsive and Adaptable

Julia and Joseph’s were willing to engage with any aspect of Artusi I brought up. The openness in our conversation matches the responsiveness I’ve experienced as a user of Artusi. I can really tell they are interested in learning from their users and integrating feedback into their design loop. It was great to hear this reiterated in our conversation.

Insightful and Thoughtful

It is clear to me that the team at Artusi has a deep knowledge of pedagogy, technology, and product development. I am inspired by Julia and Joseph’s experience and know-how of how their product is situated within the world of music education. I am confident Artusi will continue to positively impact music theory classrooms around the world.

Conversation Participants

Joseph VanderStel: Vice President of Technology

Joseph VanderStel is a music theorist, web developer, and educator based in Rochester, New York. He earned his doctorate in music theory at the Eastman School of Music, with a dissertation on syncopation in 20th-century American popular music. Joseph has published in Psychology of Music (2019), and presented at the Society for Music Perception and Cognition (2013, 2015, 2017) as well as the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (2018). As a web developer, Joseph is motivated chiefly by the desire to improve how musicians learn their craft. To this end, he has committed most waking hours of his adult life to the advancement of new web-based tools that make music theory more accessible and engaging.

Julia Cavallaro: Vice President of Marketing & User Experience

Julia Cavallaro is a freelance musician, graphic designer, and arts administrator based in Boston, Massachusetts. She received her bachelor's degree in music from Harvard College and master's degree in vocal performance from Boston University. As an opera singer and choral artist, she has performed with leading ensembles across the US, including the Boston Early Music Festival, Boston Opera Collaborative, Handel and Haydn Society, New Camerata Opera, New York Philharmonic, and GRAMMY-nominated Skylark Vocal Ensemble and True Concord Voices & Orchestra. As an administrator and designer, she previously worked for the Harvard University Office for the Arts and Tufts University Department of Music. As Artusi’s VP of Marketing and UX, she helps music educators and students use Artusi’s innovative platform to teach and learn music theory, ear training, and sight singing. She loves meeting new instructors, thinking about intuitive design, and discussing the nuances of voice-leading rules.

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