12/03/2011 -- Amy Sparks and daughter Samantha, 5 watch Patrick Sparks, 8 work on an online English lesson at the Sparks home Thu, Dec. 1, 2011. (Karl Merton Ferron / Baltimore Sun Staff) (Karl Merton Ferron, Baltimore Sun / May 16, 2012)

9:57 a.m. EDT, May 16, 2012

Online education is a hot trend at the moment. But within that trend, there's an increasingly hotter sub-trend: online music education.

Baltimore's Connections Academy, one of the bigger players in online K-12 education in the country, today announced that it's partnering with the Juilliard School in New York City to deliver online music education to pre-college students beginning this fall.

The program is called Juilliard E-Learning.

[My observation: This is a heckuva smart move by Juilliard, to extend its brand online to youngsters in K-12. I wonder if Baltimore's Peabody Institute would consider doing something like this?]

Connections operates its own network of private virtual schools around the country, and it also runs online education programs for public school systems. (I profiled the company in December.)

Connections and Juilliard will offer the online music education courses to the 40,000-plus students in its network. But it will also market the courses directly to students and educational institutions interested in partaking in an online Juilliard education experience, the company said in a news release today.

Connections and Juilliard will develop courses at first based on the national standards in elementary, middle and high school music. And Juilliard has left open the possibility that more courses and features will be added in coming years, such as music theory, music history, drama history, or dance history. And live online music lessons and virtual "master classes" could come to the platform too.

Connections is a growing Baltimore company that was bought for $400 million last year by Pearson Plc, a British publishing conglomerate.

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Juilliard, Connections Academy partner for online learning