The AEC is pleased to introduce Navigating Digitisation: A Roadmap for Higher Music Education Institutions, a strategic guide designed to help conservatoires and music academies embrace digital transformation. Aimed at institutional leaders, staff, and students, the roadmap explores how digital technologies can enhance learning and teaching while preparing students for the evolving music profession.
The roadmap was put together by the AEC ARTEMIS Digitisation Working Group.
As the industry shifts toward a digital landscape, musicians must develop skills that go beyond artistic excellence—adapting to new platforms, engaging audiences online, and embracing diverse career paths. This guide also considers the role of technology in fostering international collaboration, lifelong learning, and capacity building while also addressing sustainability, diversity, and inclusion which are all ARTEMIS’s priorities.
A key focus of the roadmap is on aligning institutional culture with modern industry practices, striking a balance between artistic excellence and professional skills development. The roadmap outlines strategies for integrating digital skills into curricula, ensuring students are equipped for careers marked by independence, flexibility, and creativity. It also provides guidance on competence development, resource management, and curriculum innovation to support digital transformation in music education.
Supporting the ARTEMIS Project’s mission of “Empowering Artists as Makers in Society,” the roadmap offers insights into both the opportunities and challenges of digitisation. By embracing digital strategies, Higher Music Education Institutions can enhance their educational offerings, ensuring they remain relevant, innovative, and responsive to the needs of today’s students and tomorrow’s music professionals.
The journey of exploring digitisation within the Higher Music Education sector has revealed that it is not just about the adoption of new technologies but about addressing deeper transformation across institutional practice, pedagogy and culture.
In the way that ARTEMIS empowers its artists-as-makers in society, digitisation has a vital role to play in empowering institutions to support their students and staff in adapting to a rapidly changing world.
The AEC ARTEMIS Digitisation Working Group Members hope that the topics covered in this guide will be useful conversation-starters. However, each institution will have its own unique context to consider, its own specific issues and its own financial constraints. While the group has tried to offer a broad sweep of options for different contexts, some ideas or approaches will not be appropriate or feasible for everyone.
