Kadenze lapped up by major universities.
By Raif Karerat
WASHINGTON, DC: Co-founded by Indian American educator Ajay Kapur, educational technology startup Kadenze recently launched an online creative arts education site that offers both free and fee-based courses that span visual art, music, and technology.
The platform, which launched on June 16, aims to become a hub for online courses in art, design, music, and other disciplines underrepresented online.
“It’s great that you can learn math and engineering and all these things that are out there,†said Kapur, who currently serves as Kadenze’s CEO, to Inside Higher Ed. “We want to bring creativity into the mix.â€
Art schools and departments have long been the outsiders looking in when it comes online education, so Kadenze is forming a network of academic institutions interested in advancing online creative arts education.
Launch partners included Princeton and Stanford Universities, California College of the Arts, the California Institute of the Arts, Cornish College of the Arts, Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Goldsmiths University of London, Otis College of Art and Design, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Seoul Institute of the Arts, the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of Saint Joseph in Macau, among others.
The foundation for Kadenze was laid at Princeton, according to the university’s news service, which is where Kapur met the startup’s other co-founder, Perry Cook.
Kapur met Cook during his junior year when he enrolled in Cook’s course, “Transforming Reality by Computer.” The following year, Cook served as Kapur’s thesis adviser. After Princeton, Kapur went on to earn his Ph.D. at the University of Victoria, working under one of Cook’s former graduate students.
Kapur became the director of music technology at California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, and he and Cook stayed in touch. With the support of a National Science Foundation grant, they developed a curriculum to teach computer science to artists, specifically at schools without a computer science department.
The NSF’s grant led to the development of a massive open online course (MOOC), which enrolled 45,000 students and planted the seed of inspiration Kadenze needed to take root.
Both Kapur and Cook are also serving as Kadenze instructors, reported the Princeton news service. Kapur helms “Introduction to Programming for Musicians and Digital Artists,” while Cook teaches “An Introduction to Physics-Based Digital Audio Synthesis and Signal Processing” with Julius Smith of Stanford University.
The fees for Kadenze’s accredited courses, which depend on the number of college credits being earned, range between $300, $600, or $900, according to business technology website Xconomy. Kadenze shares revenues with both the schools and the instructors, but specific percentages have yet to be disclosed.