Start: Pre-Covid

Before the pandemic, did the museum already have a strategy and/or offer to reach audiences online? If so, could you please talk about it and its effectiveness. How did the pandemic impact the strategy and/or offer?

Europeana is an initiative of the European Union to help the cultural sector in its digital transformation. We are a network of cultural heritage professionals and institutions (CHIs) who have been working on digital matters, offering frameworks, tools and services since we started in 2008. We run two platforms, Europeana.eu for end-users where we offer millions of digitized items drawn from thousands of institutions, and Europeana Pro addressed to professionals working in cultural heritage that need support in their digital journey.

What digital skills did the people involved in the online education projects already have? What skills did the people involved need to develop?

Most of us started as cultural lovers or education specialists with very diverse backgrounds from social sciences and humanities and are becoming literate in digital learning as we go. What we do is relatively new and it changes so fast with disruptive technologies that we learn daily by doing, and of course, we make mistakes. I would just recommend trying to be curious, flexible and open-minded with new pedagogical trends and technologies. And develop a designer mindset, prototype, try and fail. Take what works for you and your organization. Discard what is too complex, non-sustainable or scalable to a certain extent.

And of course, follow capacity-building programmes. Networks of our sector like Europeana or NEMO are offering free and self-paced programs in the form of MOOCs or regular webinars to upskill cultural heritage professionals. They are open not just to European professionals but to colleagues from all over the world. These knowledge-sharing exercises and training opportunities are growing and are accessible with just one click.

Let’s talk about partnerships. Did you use a partnership for creating content, reaching out to audiences or a community, designing formats, etc. If so, how did they contribute? Or did you need a new partnership? Please describe.

Working in partnership it’s the backbone of Europeana since its creation. Now it’s impossible to imagine a CHI without external collaborations and in dialogue with like-minded individuals and organizations, but also with those who have different perspectives and can bring the expertise you don’t have to the table. You need to grasp what happens out of your radar. By listening carefully you may understand the diversity of your potential audience and why they engage with some programs and not others, and how you can fulfill their expectations.

Of course, financial means are a key barrier to creating projects in partnership, but in Europe, there are several funding streams in the form of Erasmus+, Horizon and Creative Europe projects to overcome this issue and make your plans and ambitions happen.

All our educational programs are built with partners. With European Schoolnet, we have created a participatory platform and collaborative effort, the Teaching with Europeana blog. It offers more than 800 ready-to-use learning materials produced by hundreds of educators all over Europe to help their peers (you can see a video that explains how the project started). Since last year, museum educators are part of this project to also include materials for non-formal education that more efficiently connect with curricular educational practices.

Did your institute have a dedicated budget for digital education programs?

Yes, since 2017. Not having one is not an option anymore for any institution that wants to increase its educational outreach or even maintain the current one. CHIs need to have a holistic view and thus a digital strategy because it permeates all the organization, and beyond their microcosm, the society. You need to have a plan for educational and public programs, but also for marcomms and fundraising.  

There are great challenges we’ll need to solve like digital upskilling, unequal access to broadband and electronic devices, digital space ownership, or the digital footprint. But also, and more than ever before, there are opportunities to increase participation and extend the access to culture for minoritized groups and people with disabilities. The democratization of cultural practices and demonstrating their social impact have been the motor of our sector, so I would say there is no way back.

How was the audience reached and notified?

Social media channels and mailing distribution lists, but also participating in forums and conferences were the target audience would attend

How did you choose this digital format for the program?

To my knowledge, this is the most scalable way to train a large number of participants with an international scope, providing at the same time to each of them flexible and asynchronous paths to achieve the learning goals.

How did you consider the needs of non-fluent users of digital tools? What strategies did you use to support them to participate?

This is exactly the purpose of this course, to overcome their fears and make them more confident using digital technologies. It’s a course made by educators to support other educators, so they know first hand their challenges. The course is structured in such an intuitive and practical way that educators end up learning by designing their learning scenario with digital means. The best materials, peer-reviewed at the end of the course by other participants, feed back our Teaching with Europeana blog, as a reward for their learning efforts. We believe this is also an added value for the course.

What role did partnerships play in delivering the program?

When we design these courses, we use a collaborative approach. In short, we provide the content and European Schoolnet, as pedagogical experts, shape it for training purposes. We also work together with educators from different countries and levels of education, to produce each module, so we make sure to include the target group perspective. Partners finally deliver it and moderate it. Talk up your brand.

Lessons learned

In Europe, when you want to scale your programmes the main barrier is the language. Multilinguality is a passport you need to reach the educational communities you want to.  

I think the intuitiveness of the course was most successful. Educators already know most of the things we are explaining to them, but in many cases, they are simply not confident to put this knowledge in a digital format. With a very flexible path and guidance from the moderators, they found the necessary tools and content to make it happen.

Most of our less positive comments were about increasing the level of interaction and collaboration among peers, which is always a must in the digital sphere. We are taking these recommendations on board for the 2022 release.

If there is more money available our first action would be to build more language versions! But we know that this is not always possible.

I will always use the expertise of educators to build a program addressed to their peers and I would never consider it one unique milestone. You always have to revisit it and enrich or adapt it to the new needs.

In our case, this pandemic wasn’t strictly a pivotal moment for our digital strategy. It was already in place as digital transformation is our core business, so we’ve been steady in our offerings but intensifying our services due to a pick in the pandemic. Nevertheless, it made us more relevant and aware of our role in social change by helping the sector.

New opportunities

* Audiences: Yes. For us to connect formal and non-formal practices, we needed to engage in the design of our learning products, museum educators, librarians and other CHI professionals working in education. Our main target group when we started our educational activities in 2017, were teachers so for us it was a challenge to involve non-formal educators in our plans and vision for digital learning practices.

* Funding: What funding is available? We have extended our radar to different EU funding to increase our educational offer. Every European institution can access it.

* Partnerships: Due to this new target group (non-formal educators), we are intensifying conversations with networks like ICOM-CECA, NEMO or PL2030

* Is the project/program intended to be permanent for a specific time or a one-off? We aim to keep it as long as the funding is available and the audience confirms this is what they need. Like many other institutions, we have to deal with uncertainties.

* Can the project ever become permanent? How? Is there anything permanent in education? Or in our liquid society? I think this should never be the ultimate goal. We should avoid canons and be adaptive to new knowledge, and to that aim, our programs need to be open and flexible enough. As Maria Montessori said, art and education have no bounds or limits.

* Do you have suggestions for a person or institution that has to start to reach audiences digitally? Keep curious (if there is no curiosity there is no learning), look for capacity building opportunities (there are more and more free courses and communities and networks that can help you get started), collaboration (search for those with the expertise you lack or the views and angles you don’t have) and design thinking (baby steps that you can always test and, if successful, increment).