Archived under: Entrepreneurship, Teaching
Over 47,000 Students Taught
One of my colleagues at Arizona State has taught over 47,000 students! He is featured right now in an ASU News article, which begins,
When Mike Shellans graduated from the University of Arizona in 1979 with a bachelor’s degree in jazz and contemporary media, his goal was to “make it big” as a jazz trombonist in Los Angeles.
Instead, he found himself driving a forklift for Braun Construction, the company that was building a new Budweiser plant in Sepulveda, Calif., and playing an isolated gig here and there. He found Los Angeles to be a tough and expensive market to break into.
After a few years of discouragement, he decided to come to ASU to study for a graduate degree in trombone performance. While pursuing his graduate studies, he served as a teaching assistant for undergraduate classes about jazz in America.
“Then George Umberson, the director of the School of Music, asked if I would like to teach a class myself,” Shellans said.
Shellans taught large section courses to begin, and then developed hybrid classes that involved live lectures to large classes of students with online testing, and currently teaches entirely online courses. Check out the full article for more information (his photo below is linked 
from their article) as this is actually a trend that really is an important part of what will keep many music schools going financially. For what is generated by all of this online teaching of large courses on topics including the Beatles and Elvis Presley is much more income than any horn teacher (for example) can bring into a music school.
To get an idea of what he is teaching, this page is the portal to his “Beatles After the Beatles” course which was launched Spring of 2009. He describes this online course as covering “each Beatle’s solo career after 1970, including albums, hit songs, milestone concerts and personal information.” The syllabus may be accessed from the site for the class without registration to get more of an idea of what is covered in an online course of this type.
Another aspect of this too I would like to highlight is the enterprise of it all. If you click over to his website you can see that he is busy with a variety of musical activities besides his Senior Lecturer position at Arizona State. It is a model that music students need to increasingly keep in mind, to always be enterprising and take advantages of the opportunities you have.
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