What is online learning in museums?

I've been reflecting quite a lot recently on what online learning means in a museum context. 

Is it just for schools?

Or just for schools and children outside schools?

Or for schools, children and adults taking part in a formal course?

Or is it for everyone? 

What constitutes learning in an online context?

Is it learning that takes place when you're looking at something online?

Or is it the delivery online of tools that help you learn on- and offline?

And where do you see responsibility for online learning as sitting within a museum?

I obviously have views of my own on all these things, and I may blog about them at some point, but I'm interested to hear what other people think and what museum online learning is seen as being. 

Please leave your comments here if you have a view on this! I'd be really interested to hear people's thoughts. And please feel free to raise further questions too if you have any!

Thanks all!

What can museums learn from universities about online learning?

Last night I went to a seminar at the University of Westminster. The seminar was public but part of the Johns Hopkins University museum studies summer school. The students are part of an online museum studies course similar to the one I did at Leicester except the distance learning element is conducted online rather than through big blue folders of paper!

Phyllis Hecht the course director talked about how the course works and most particularly about how they have built a community online through social media, and through the various softwares they use as part of the course.

The course is mostly asychronous, but they do also have live webinars that are also recorded to listen to later. They have chat rooms and an online museum cafe where students can chat about anything they want, course related or not. I can really see the value of building this community online and really investing time and effort into it and making it a required and encouraged part of the learning experience. Distance learning can be such an isolating experience and there's a risk that you miss out on so much of the serendipitous stuff that you get from bumping into someone on a university campus or bouncing ideas off each other in seminars.

It made me think about whether museums should be running online courses in the same way (some already are of course) and whether or not it would be just as important to build that community. I imagine museum online courses would be much much shorter which is a key difference and probably would make the vast amounts of work that goes in to Phyllis's online community untenable and perhaps to an extent less necessary. I also thought that it would be very hard for a museum to resource the amount of interaction Phyllis described. Nevertheless, I do think that if museums did go down the road (or continue down it) of offering short online courses in the same way as some run short courses for adults onsite, it would be important that the course tutor invested some time in building some kind of community online in order to facilitate the learning experience by providing some of the social interaction that you would get in an onsite course.

The main problems that Phyllis encounters are to do with the technology failing and I think that would be a key thing for museums to consider carefully before embarking on running an online course.

Rebecca Sinker, Curator: Digital Learning at Tate also then talked about her role and some of the questions it raises. I found this fascinating because she raised so many questions that I've battled with myself and also some new ones that I hadn't thought of. I think it's clear that museums and galleries still have some way to go before they/we completely work out what online learning really means and what its implications are.

The conversations that then ensued from the floor were also fascinating. It was so great to be part of a group of intellectual and articulate people all theorising and raising interesting discussions about what I do on a daily basis. It's so easy to get lost in the day-to-day and so important to go to these kinds of discussions once in a while to remind yourself of the issues and remember why we work in this wonderful, interesting sector that's so full of great objects and promotes so many discussions all the time about the best ways to share them.

New museum online learning content strategy - your thoughts please

Update 25 July - I should just add a bit of a disclaimer/explanation here:
1. This thinking isn't related to the work I do in my paid work, more just me rolling ideas around in my head about museum online learning generally
2. This isn't particularly the start of a strategy document, more just some ideas about a modus operandi/working principles (maybe strategy with a small 's'?) for museum online learning.
 
Original post:
I was part of the workshop to critically evaluate the National Musuems Online Learning Project webquests yesterday and as ever, when I step away from my desk, the curtain opened in my brain and I was able to think more broadly then I ever can normally about my job and how I go about it.

Some thoughts developed which I want to expand upon about what a museum online learning strategy should be about and this germ of an idea is brewing in my head that I'd like to hear people's thoughts and comments on.  It's very much a germ of an idea at the moment and I'm sure it has lots of disadvantages so I'd really appreciate your feedback.

What would you think of a museum online learning strategy that set out the following:

1. Online learning resources for schools and colleges that sit on the Museum's website should be in the following forms:

A) A bank of object images with contextual information about them that teachers/tutors/students can download and use for educational use

B) A set of short introductions to the topics that the museum is an authority on

C) A set of short films with schools/colleges as the target audience where a curator talks about particular objects and what you can learn from them

D) A set of relatively light-touch/low-tech pre-visit (and possibly post-visit) resources that support the school/college sessions run by the Museum.  These might be in PPT or SMART notebook or something and would simply serve to introduce key concepts and objects that relate to the session.
In other words the stuff on a museum websites is relatively unprescriptive and is about opening up our 'stuff' and making it available to educators to do what they want with it.

2) All material where the primary aim is to provide a learning experience online that is independent to a face-to-face museum session (and I think this particularly applies to informal learning material online, and to more prescriptive and structured formal learning which does a lot of the teaching for the teacher) e.g. an online game, or an interactive story should do the following :

A) If it is for schools/colleges, pick on particular topic or area of a topic and create a resource to support that area of the curriculum

B) Be developed in partnership with other organisations who have authority on that subject

C) Be developed in partnership with commercial and other big organisations who are already providing this kind of content or where the target audience are already spending time. The idea would be for an equal partnership where funds and resources were put in from both parties

D) Emphasis is put on the findability of the resource from the start

E) Significant budget/resources are set aside for marketing the resource

F) Potentially sit on an independent URL or a place where the target audience are already spending time rather than on the museum's website (Update: 25 July - this is an addition that I meant to put in and realised I'd omitted)

These ideas are based on the following assumptions/observations/thoughts:

• There's no point in museums trying to compete for people's attention and leisure time with online activities which are much better funded than museums are ever likely to be.
• People will only come to museum websites either if they know that there is material there or if they find it by accident in Google.
• We have limited resources both in terms of budget and staff time and it's vital that we channel our energies wisely.

Please please feel free to use the comments to let me know what you think. I'd really value some discussion on this and so I hope it gets people thinking and chatting. Over to you!

Quick summary of an MW2002 paper: How do you like to learn?

I just read an interesting paper that was referenced in some research by my former colleague Mariruth Leftwich. I would recommend reading it if you're interested in Museum online learning. It's a little out of date now but I think it still has some interesting findings.  The article is by David T. Schaller, Steven Allison-Bunnell, Minda Borun and Margaret B. Chambers and was presented at the Museums and the Web conference in 2002. You can read the full article here: How do you like to learn? Comparing User Preferences And Visit Length Of Educational Web Sites (and I recommend that you do!)

This is just a quick summary of some points that I found particularly useful from it.

1. They use a typology from Gammon (Ben Gammon, 2001 - Assessing learning in museum environments: A practical guide for museum evaluators. Unpublished Science Museum (London) report) to identify five types which museums should choose from when thinking about what kind of educational experience they want their users to have: cognitive, affective, social, developing skills and personal.
2. Their research was based on six activity types - creative play, guided tour, interactive reference, puzzle/interactive mystery, role-playing story, simulation
3. They found that adults preferred interactive reference and simulation and children preferred creative play and role-playing
4. They found that boys preferred creative play and girls role-playing story and puzzle/mystery
5. They concluded that: 'Adults prefer the information-based activities of Interactive Reference and Simulation, whereas children, not surprisingly, are more inclined to prefer the exploratory experiences of Role-playing and Story and Creative Play. The adult sites yield more straight-forward cognitive information while the sites preferred by children have strong affective components and allow more personal choice and interaction, but can lead to "dead ends" or less utilitarian solutions.  Apparently, adults bring an intrinsic motivation to the learning experience... Children on the other hand, need to be motivated. They respond positively to the opportunity for interaction and choice within a goal-based environment that offers them an extrinsic purpose.'
6. They unpick this idea of a goal-based environment, quoting Roger Schank (1992) and explain that the goals are not things like high scores or prizes but things that 'stem from the activity itself - solve a crime, reach a destination, create an original artwork.' Using an example of stuff that I've worked on myself, the Create a costume game for 3-5 year olds that we produced last year uses this kind of goal (dragging shapes onto a costume and then colouring it in based on items from the Museum of London's collections).  The authors here point out that puzzle/mystery and role-playing story lend themselves particularly well to this kind of idea of a goal.
7. They explain that 'Young or novice learners who are unfamiliar with a particular learning domain need such guidance and structure to attract and hold their attention'. They also point out, however, that 'Within the structure and guidance provided by [goal-based scenarios], young learners prefer some degree of freedom.
8. They round up their paper with a list of things that developers of educational web activities should consider:

i. the fact that children like to have goals whereas adults prefer reference sites
ii. the need to choose a pedagogical approach i.e. which kind of activity they're going to produce
iii. the expertise of the audience in the subject in hand - they conclude that 'Expert learners with existing interest in the domain are more likely to favor interactive references sites. Novice learners, regardless of age, are more likely to need and prefer a guided experience to introduce them to the subject and motivate them to learn about it.'
iv. the fact that this level of expertise also affects the learning goals of an activity

9. They end with a caveat to their conslusions, saying that just because something holds people's attention doesn't mean that it is achieving its goals but that 'a web activity or any other learning activity must first attract and hold the interest of learners in order to have the opportunity to achieve its learning objectives.'

I hope others find this quick summary as useful as I found the article and are tempted to read it in full.  It's certainly useful to me for a project I'm currently working on to be able to quote studies of the different behaviours of adults and children in their online learning and interesting, generally, to slot the projects that I've worked on into the different categories above and assess them from that perspective.