Designing a Cooperative Music Listening Class through Online Visual Design: Exploring 100 Years of Korean Popular Music (K-POP) Using Canva

This study aims to design and implement a cooperative music-listening class using the online visual design tool Canva, and to investigate the educational effects of such online collaboration-based activities on middle-school students’ music-listening experiences. The instructional program was conducted over six lessons in September 2025. In this class, students explored Korean popular music from 1926 to 2025 by dividing it into five historical periods, and engaged in real-time collaborative design tasks using Canva. They then participated in online exhibition viewing, explanation, comparison, and discussion activities as part of the listening instruction sequence. The findings are as follows. First, the Canva-based cooperative listening class enhanced students’ interest, listening attitude, and participation, while the visual composition and collaborative design-editing processes improved their comprehension. Second, connecting representative songs from each era with relevant social, cultural, and technological backgrounds strengthened students’ ability to interpret music within broader cultural and historical contexts. Third, collaborative discussions comparing musical characteristics across generations promoted students’ cultural empathy regarding generational differences and continuities in music. These results demonstrate that online visual-design tools effectively transform music listening from “passive hearing” into an integrated learning process of inquiry, interpretation, expression, and sharing through digital collaboration. This study proposes a practical model for digital cooperative listening education and offers insights for designing future-oriented music-listening instruction.