Digital Works Podcast
Talking about all the different things that 'digital' means in the arts, culture and heritage sectors. Tales of success and failure, interrogating the shiny new things and looking at what works (or not) and why, Interviews with digital folks working across the sector and beyond, in-house, consultants, funders, and more.
Digital Works Podcast
This is how we built...a platform for teaching music
Aurora Classroom, from the Aurora Orchestra, began as an idea to convert a live children’s storytelling concert into a classroom resource during the pandemic.
In this conversation with Aurora Orchestra's Learning Director, Rebecca Barnett we hear how over the last five years it has grown into a comprehensive creative learning platform, showcasing Aurora’s resources for primary, secondary and SEND schools, live events for young people, and CPD for teachers.
Whilst it started out like many other EdTech products as a subscription platform, after considerable deliberation the Aurora team took the leap to remove the paywall in April 2025.
This is how we built… shares the honest stories behind digital projects in the cultural sector, exploring what sparked them, how they were delivered (and what they cost), what nearly went (or did go) wrong, an the lessons learned along the way.
Welcome to This Is How We Built, a short series from DigitalWorks digging into the real stories behind digital projects in the cultural sector. Each episode is about 20 minutes, covering the ideas, the costs, the surprises, and the lessons learned. I'm Ashman, a consultant who works with cultural organizations on digital strategy and initiatives. And I hope you find these conversations honest, practical, and useful. Okay, let's go. Today we'll hear from Rebecca Barnett. Rebecca is the learning director at Aurora Orchestra. We'll hear about Aurora Classroom, which began as an idea to convert a live children's storytelling concert into a classroom resource during the pandemic. Over the last five years, it has grown into a comprehensive creative learning platform showcasing Aurora's resources for primary, secondary, and SEND schools. We'll hear about the importance of iteration, learning on the job, and making some bold decisions about switching from a paid subscription model to open access. Enjoy. Rebecca, Aurora Classroom. What was the original idea?
SPEAKER_00:So I wasn't there at the beginning. That's probably quite important to note for all of these things. But the original idea was bringing our live concerts to as many children as possible. That's always been Aurora's plan. But we're a small team, we're a small orchestra, particularly at the time when this started back in the pandemic in 2020. But the pandemic afforded us the time, as I think for lots of arts organisations, to actually focus on it. We didn't have any live activity, we didn't have any concerts, and so we could actually bring our concerts to children through a digital platform. As it spann out of control, then it became, oh, we can also do this and we can do this and we can help teachers because we saw what was coming home to homes during the pandemic, during home learning, and thought, well, you know what, we can add something to the sector with this. That's where we started. And then, as I say, it was a slippery slope. We've ended up now with a giant platform and many, many, many pounds spent on it to get there.
SPEAKER_01:As you've just said there, you know, this was, I think probably from the outset, quite an ambitious project and expanded from there. You've also said the Aurora team is a small team, you know, you've grown, but still relatively small team. Who was involved in this project?
SPEAKER_00:So, Jane Mitchell, who's Aurora's creative director and one of the founders, Jane is at the heart of everything. Jane's ideas, Jane has a brain that everybody would love to have. She is incredibly creative and sees these big picture ideas, and she has the dream. And then we can make the dream happen in some cases, and this is one of those cases. Jane could see the potential of the thing. And so they started off back in 2020, they filmed and then they made some activities, and then they made some more activities, but obviously it can't just be one person. And so our production team were involved, they were making props and scheduling filming and all of those things. We had a film crew, Stanton Media, who filmed everything and edited it. And of course, the web designers, we are not um web designers at Aurora Orchestra, funnily enough. And so we had an amazing team, and we still work with them now, who have just got multiple people working in different areas. So from the design stage to the marketing site stage to the app itself, we're just so lucky to have them on board because they have brought it to life.
SPEAKER_01:You know, you mentioned you weren't there at the beginning, beginning, but you've certainly been involved heavily since then. Practically, how did you go about making launching Aurora classroom?
SPEAKER_00:So I would say the first unit was learn by doing. There was no master plan. And I think that a lot of these projects across the sector maybe have the image of there was years of planning and implementation and trials and pilots, and that was not the case. We did pilot the project once it had been created because we wanted to see how it worked in schools as everybody was coming back from the pandemic. But it was very much, oh well, we've done that. Now let's do the next thing. Oh, now why don't we make some more films? And it very much got out of control because of that method. So it started off by filming the show. We then made teaching films around the kind of the salient music points. So if there was a song that would teach tempo really well, then we'd do some activities around that, led by our workshop leader Jesse. And then we would look at what we had and then go, oh well, we could also do this. So then there was another day of filming and there was another day of audio recording. So that's why how long is a piece of string with these projects? There needs to be a cutoff at some point. Then it was talking to the web team and saying, we've got all of this stuff, we want it to look like this in a classroom. How do we go about that? And I think that's probably the biggest bit of learning that website development is very expensive. And it's a little bit like doing an extension on a house, isn't it? Anything's possible with time and money. So, how much do you want to put behind this? And we were really fortunate we had some really great trust and foundation support so that we could really make a really lovely looking project and something that had a great user experience. So it wasn't just chucking it all up there, it was really thought about the user from the beginning. Well, maybe not the beginning, maybe five steps in.
SPEAKER_01:So you mentioned there, you know, you had some external funding. I imagine also some sort of core or budget might have gone into this. And you also mentioned, you know, there were lots of steps to this after the original idea. How long did it take and what did it cost?
SPEAKER_00:Okay, the money. I tried to work it out. I've I've got a rough working here. I'd love to have an actual figure, but I also would be terrified to see that actual figure. Because in those early days, because there was no orchestral activity happening, I think that they were able to put more behind it than necessarily we ever thought was going to be the case. If you put in development costs, staffing costs, production costs, editing, I think we're approaching£500,000. But that is over a five-year project. So this all started in 2020. Our very first unit, Magical Toy Box, took two years in its kind of development and until it made it into schools that included a pilot in schools in London. And then we moved straight on to our second unit. It's been a unit a year since then. So, yeah, five years, and we're still very much still learning. Of course, we are, it's all learning, isn't it? But where that first unit took two years to create, we now create them in nine months. That's where the learning comes from. You start going, well, there's no point scheduling anything until we've done all of the audio recording. And then if we do that in November, we can film in January, and then the editing will take place till March. Knowing those timescales has just been one of the biggest learning curves. For me in particular, coming from just being a teacher, you know, I was 100% education until I joined Aurora in 2022. So I joined right at the end of my support toy box. So at the kind of first website launch, basically.
SPEAKER_01:Have you noticed, you know, you sort of said that the I suppose the production cycles have become more of a known quantity and a sort of planable block of time. Have you found also that there's been a economies of scale benefit? Have the costs come down or sort of stabilized across each production cycle, or are you always trying something new?
SPEAKER_00:So Magical Toy Box was expensive because it was the train that ran away a little bit. So because it was like, I'll just do this, I'll just do this. And also it was the first thing. So all of the setup costs are related to that unit. Our second unit in hindsight was incredibly ambitious. It's called Meet the Instruments. And we got together with two primary colleagues who were kind of the expert eyes on the primary music stuff. I'm secondary by nature, so they knew the real in-the-classroom stuff very well. And again, Jane was part of these conversations, and it was like, oh, well, it would be great if we did this, and how about we do this? And we basically created four units in one. So that didn't get any cheaper. But by number three, when we saw how much we'd spent on one and two, we just went, you know, we need a sustainable model, something that can be churned out and we can do repetitions of. We've not yet done a repetition though, but we will. It is the plan that we've now got the blueprint theoretically that we can duplicate. But really, the cost deficiencies are coming from putting limits on time that we want people to spend on things. I think in the very early days, we would look at all of the films and we would go back and say, Oh, can you just there's a shoe scuff at three minutes 22? Can you get rid of the shoe scuff? And we still want that, but actually you also need to go at that with the same process of going, how many days editing have you got left to stay within budget? So it's that jewel, keeping your brain on both sides of the things. And we don't want shoe scuffs, but they can be avoided better if you do it on the day. So if you notice it was a really noisy take, do the tape again.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so it sounds like there's sort of lessons being learned, and as a result, you're maybe slightly tweaking the process in a way that you otherwise perhaps wouldn't have done.
SPEAKER_00:Yes, absolutely. And very much like everything in Magical Toy Box was learned by doing, unit on unit, it is still learned by doing. We're coming to this as not ed tech experts, and you know, that really translates into our marketing as well. That we can talk for hours on marketing and marketing to teachers is impossible. But I'm a teacher by trade. You'd think that I should be able to market to myself, but no, I'm a teacher, they are orchestral professionals or production professionals. None of us have grown up in a digital sphere in this way. And I think that's probably the case for lots of people working in ed tech now, that none of us grew up with it. And we're all going, oh gosh, okay, this is how it works. I now know about backends and websites. You know, that was not the case five years ago. Oh, except for MySpace HTML. I was really good at that.
SPEAKER_01:We are the same generation. And it sounds like you would be exposed to so many new things and new ideas and new processes. But what really surprised you along the way?
SPEAKER_00:Oh, initially I was amazed that a cultural organization could invest so much money in a project like this. That was the biggest thing, being someone coming from outside of the cultural sector and someone coming from teaching, where we have no money. My music department's budget was less than a thousand pounds the last year that I was head of department. And that is to teach hundreds of children in a secondary setting to buy everything, buy the exercise books. And it just wasn't, yeah, money was very scarce, and obviously we know that the arts are underfunded, but then to see an orchestra really prioritizing cultural education in this way just blew me away. So that was the first big surprise. In terms of the development, I think, as I mentioned before, marketing, I thought there'd be a silver bullet. I thought there'd be just a fix that you know there'll be someone out there who knows how to do it. It turns out there's not. And you can probably say that about lots of things, that there's not just the one person who knows how to do it. But teachers are a really unique beast, and we have tried so many things and ways to get to them, and it's because every teacher is slightly different. There's not enough of a, I guess, a pool of people that go, Oh, this is the homogenous person that you will get into. Schools are different, it depends who you're pitching to. Is it her teacher? Is it a music lead? Is it a generalist teacher? Is it a really keen parent who lets the school know that they want this resource used? It could be anyone. So that has been really surprising. I thought that that could just be taken care of. But no, it takes up quite a lot of my time. And then also, I suppose the things which cost money in web development are not the things that I thought would cost money. And so I'm just incredibly grateful for the team who work on the website stuff that I can go with some ideas, and sometimes it's that is no problem, that will take me 20 minutes. And sometimes it goes, that's three days of development. Are you sure you want to do this?
SPEAKER_01:You've mentioned already that certainly at the start, the ambition of the project led to it snowballing, perhaps. What didn't work, or perhaps what nearly really didn't work.
SPEAKER_00:Well, I definitely missed any near-misses at the beginning. I'm sure there were things in the first two years. They would be the good closet stories, I think. Looking at the whole experience, we I think have been tempted a couple of times to try and do things that other people are doing. So to try and level up in different ways or try to do everything. We were tempted by one organization who kind of promised great commercial growth. We put quite a lot of time into that, and shocker, it didn't work. And so that was a shame. But we probably should have believed in our own product and known that that wasn't the thing to do. But honestly, I think because we've taken a long time over the thing, we've not had any big catastrophes in the way that we've not had to completely redesign the product. The one thing that we can probably talk about in greater detail after is we launched as a subscription platform, and that didn't work. That's the big one, because we had a good core of people coming to subscribe to the platform, but it was a barrier, and people don't need more barriers to getting music education in schools.
SPEAKER_01:You've sort of mentioned that intentionally or not, it feels like learning happened on this project, whether you wanted it to or not. But specifically, what do you really feel that you've learned over the last three years?
SPEAKER_00:So I feel that I've become a jack of all trades. I don't love the connotations that that term has sometimes, but I think that being in a small organisation and doing this sort of work, we all become that. I seemingly have quite a good understanding now of the web, about websites and the things. I've become a self-appointed marketing expert. I'm not our marketing manager, they have much more knowledge than I do. But I now look at things, and when you have adverts and you don't know who the company is, or you don't know what sector they belong in, and I sit there and I'm furious about it. So I've learned that brand is incredibly important, and the way that you keep a brand running through a product is incredibly important, and that you have about three seconds to engage somebody. And if it's not there, it's not there. We are far from perfect in what we do, but it is very much at the centre. And I would probably say that lots of the web design and web development team have been really helpful in that and thinking about user experience. I now come at it going, it's taking us too many clicks to get somewhere. I don't like it. Or when you have to scroll down a page to get somewhere. No, people don't want to do that. People have got a small amount of time, and a scroll and a click is where you lose somebody. So, yeah, that's been a big learning curve for me there. And um, just probably for me personally, to be able to have the big ideas and run with them. Again, coming from teaching, you can't have those ideas because you're confined by a curriculum or money, or the children you're working with, or the senior team, whoever it is, but there's always something keeping you in your box. Here, you can really go, well, what do we want to do next? And now we can plan it and not rush into it.
SPEAKER_01:And you've mentioned subscriptions. But what since launch has really worked and maybe really has not worked.
SPEAKER_00:What has worked, we have a great product that works really well. When it gets into schools, we stand by the fact it's a really lovely thing and teachers enjoy it. Teachers find it does save their time and they enjoy doing it, the children enjoy it. There's really great songs. What has worked is the experts we have worked with. And I would very much take that as yes, part of myself. Knowing education, knowing teachers, our primary colleagues who have just been invaluable, worth their weight and gold in this whole project, but also the people who pull us in and say that's not going to work, whether it's in a filming environment or whether it's when we're trying to put it onto the app, just go, no, that's horrible. Don't do that. So that has worked really well. And trusting those people, whilst I would say, as I did before, I'm a jack of all trades now, it seems, I'm not the expert, and I very much would always defer to those people. What hasn't worked, subscription was a barrier. We had great sites that this was going to be a lovely commercial stream, a lovely income stream that you know would mean that we'd take the pressure off having to earn as much in ticket sales and all of those things. And it just did not happen, you know, it didn't earn enough to wash its own face at any point. So it certainly wasn't going to be making enough to support the orchestral side of the business. So that is the hard no on that one. And I think actually in reshaping it, so we went free in April 2025. So it's very new, but already in the quarter after going free, the number of users increased by 50% purely because people knew that it wasn't just a free trial anymore. They had their account, they can come back to it. It's there, they can click around with no paywall, there will never be a paywall for the foreseeable future for as long as we know that we're doing this. And I think it fits us better in our values as an organization. It was always a question of how do we sit a commercial product alongside an arts sector and the orchestra, you know, we were trying to be many, many things, but that bold move I think has very much fitted our personality as an organization, and we're in it to improve music education and children's musical experiences and teachers' experiences, because you've got a situation here where the majority of people delivering primary school music are not people with music degrees, and that is absolutely fine, other than the fact that they don't necessarily feel confident delivering it, and so we want to be able to support them to go actually, I'm not dreading this music lesson this week. I know that I can do it. I don't have to sing in front of my class of nine-year-olds, and they're going to make fun of me. And it might be in years that they grow the confidence to sing in front of their class of nine-year-olds, but not everybody has that. So, yes, that is a long answer to what worked and what hasn't worked.
SPEAKER_01:You know, launching something that stays static requires maintenance, but you've launched something and added to it and introduced additional content and extended the functionality and changed the commercial model. How did you plan for and how have you sort of dealt with that question of maintenance, keeping the lights on?
SPEAKER_00:Yes, it's front and centre at the moment of what we're considering doing because we're conscious that we can't just keep creating, we can't just keep shoving more stuff up there and hope that it does because some things are going to start to look tired. So we're now at the stage, five years in, that creation is continuing, creation will continue, particularly in the secondary age range. So I have just become full-time with the orchestra. That's quite a big shift that we can put even more time behind development work educationally. But we're now looking at making sure that there's plenty of resources for secondary schools. We're not just a one-trick pony, we're not just doing send and primary, we're also increasing our live activity to include more schools. But we are also looking to go back and revisit what we've already got there. And we're working on teachers' feedback. If teachers are saying, Oh, that lesson was really long and too much screens, and we're very conscious of the use of ed tech, but that not being over reliant on just play a video, just do this, just do this. When I trained to teach, it was very much the age of death by PowerPoint. Every lesson was like, make a PowerPoint, make a PowerPoint. And you know, children were going through five hours of lessons a day where it was like, here's the next PowerPoint. Oh my gosh, I couldn't sit through that. So of course 14-year-olds weren't enjoying it. So that's very front and center in our mind at the moment. So as we're looking at revamping things, going back, refreshing, updating content, making sure there's no duplication, and really investing in that to keep the thing an ever-growing beast, I suppose.
SPEAKER_01:And last but by no means least, if someone came to you and they said, Rebecca, this sounds really exciting. We're thinking of doing something similar. What's your advice?
SPEAKER_00:Stand by your USP. We've been tempted many times to go and oh, add this to the pile, add this, add this. Particularly from an education perspective, people say, Oh, will you be a complete scheme? Will you do this? Can you do this? And I think we're inherently people pleasers. So we we want to go, oh yeah, okay, I will add that. No, because it dilutes your product and you need to do your thing incredibly well and stick by it and do the work, do the legwork that means that that's a success, not it's a success because there's more. I suppose tied in with that, more does not equal better. Start with something small, start with something really good and make it really high quality. And that's the one thing that I'm incredibly proud of that it was already set up before I joined the organization, but it's something that we definitely continued is that quality comes first. And quality should then be the proof in the pudding, really. And people stick by it. I mentioned it before, but marketing material, I think it's a game changer. I know it's a game changer. You know, do people know what you're doing? I see so many products day to day within our space and obviously externally, but I'm most focused on music and ed tech. And if I don't know what you're doing, without scrolling down the screen, I don't want to go to about us and I don't want to go to learn more. I want to know on page one what you're doing. That would be my big bugbell on that. And I think for me, working so many different people, I think don't underestimate the power of a well-organised Google Sheet that everybody's on, everybody can see the plan, everybody's working in the same place because we're all working in different time zones and different priorities. And I don't want to join another Trello or Slack or this or that. I'm on so many, another app. So I don't know, I'm old school. Is Google Sheets old school? I'm not sure. Maybe. But keep it in one place and someone has to be the organized one. You can't have all creative, someone needs to pin it down. And that is probably why they employed me. I'm that one. So yeah, keep it organized, keep it efficient.
SPEAKER_01:Great. Rebecca, thank you so much for your insight and your honesty this morning. I really enjoyed the chat.
SPEAKER_00:My pleasure. Thank you, Ash.
SPEAKER_01:Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this conversation and want to hear more, you can find all episodes of the podcast on thedigital.works. And if your organization needs help making sense of digital, you can get in touch with me via my website at Ashman.co. That's man with two ends. See you next time.
