The VISITOR Project, part 0: An introduction

In February 2023 I attended a training event hosted by the Institute of Educational Technology at the Open University in Milton Keynes, designed to introduce us to VISITOR, a project aimed primarily at teachers but of explicit relevance to educators in the heritage sector too.

It's possible to wander around various heritage sites, including the British Museum, via the medium of Google Street View (try it, above), but should virtual visits be limited to simply recreating the physical visitor experience in the digital domain?

This started as a review of the training, but I found the project so fascinating it became more of a commentary on the broader project and its outputs, growing beyond all sensible bounds for just one post. I decided to split it into a series of (approximately)^[1] four posts, each dedicated to a VISITOR project output (see below).

I hope that it may be of use to fellow educators in the education and/or heritage sectors. I welcome and encourage further discussion related to anything written in this series but it must be made clear that I have no official relationship with the project: it just ticks a host of boxes related to my professional and personal interests.

VISITOR…

… stands for VIrtual muSeums InThe cOvid eRa. It is an Erasmus+ funded collaboration between British, Greek, French and Belgian organisations aiming to develop tools and resources to enable educators to create their own museum exhibitions in a digital environment. There are four key outputs planned:

1. An online library of digital museum learning tools
2. An interactive game-based museum tour building app
3. Learning content
4. An online training course

My exploration of each began at the training event itself and the fact that I have been inspired to delve deeper hopefully does something to convey an idea of the worth that I think this project has. I hope that aspects of it get properly adopted and developed by the heritage and education sectors.

I was introduced to the VISITOR project in June 2021 when a colleague from a different project passed on a survey which intended to harvest teachers’ expectations regarding virtual museum tours, and their experiences so far with such provision. The results were presented in March 2022 at the IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference and published in its subsequent proceedings^[2]. This is the abstract:

‘Students have always been main targets for museums with clear learning strategies between schools and museums that contribute to a reinforced student learning experience. Although several museums offer virtual experiences (also available for schools), these cannot be easily manipulated or combined with other resources to form curriculum-focused learning activities. This study aims to explore the views and expectations of teachers on the use of Virtual Museum Tours (VMT) in their classrooms. Main findings from an online survey with 101 teachers (with or without VMT experience) shed light on their motivations and challenges when engaging their classrooms in such activities. Statistical analysis and visualisations were used to present teachers’ experiences and expectations, and a binary logistic regression analysis was employed to indicate the factors that associate with teachers’ decision to join VMTs in their classrooms. This study’s observations have implications for the design of customisable VMTs for schools, for how museums develop VMTs that facilitate school participation, and how game designers develop virtual gaming apps used in formal education settings.’^[3]

The report presents the study’s findings with respect to understanding teachers’ previous experience with technology-enhanced learning and virtual museum tours (VMTs), motivations and challenges related to taking part in them, and, ultimately, their expectations for a hypothetical game-based learning app aimed at facilitating VMTs. You can read the outcomes in the report itself, but key findings include the following:

• Motivations for taking part in VMTs were related to a desire to use novel teaching methods in classrooms associated with aims to develop student experiences of museums more generally.
• Explicit curriculum links, whilst important, were not key motivations for participation compared to the improvement of engagement and interest in learning activities in general.
• The main challenges identified included lacking time to make the most of VMTs (e.g. designing activities to extend and embed the experience); lacking confidence (either in the reliability of the technology or in their own ability to utilise it); and concerns relating to extra workload.
• Differences between the requirements and expectations of experienced and inexperienced teachers, and of teachers of different subjects, were noticed . Reasons are suggested including the possibility that some subjects’ curricula (e.g. art, archaeology) are more naturally aligned with heritage sector experiences work than others are (e.g. science, technology), so more work may be required to integrate experiences into curriculum learning activities.

The authors reference other studies that have come to similar conclusions, and my own MA project uncovered findings that align particularly well with the first and second bullet points above.

One small concern is that the term Virtual Museum Tour is never explicitly defined, either when it is first introduced, or in terms of the respondents' expectations. Each of the constituent words has a natural fuzziness to it, and their combination only serves to compound this (especially given the linguistic and cultural boundaries necessarily involved in an international collaboration). Maybe such terms can be refined during the course of the project.

Findings from this survey informed the development of the four main project outcomes, with a specific focus on the second: the interactive game-based museum tour building app. This will be the focus of the third post in this series^[4], with the second^[5] focusing on the online library of digital museum learning tools.

As this series is currently being written the next post is not yet available. If you’re interested in finding out more about this project please make sure you subscribe to my blog to get an email notification when future instalments are released.

Footnotes:

1. I realised it probably needed an introduction, so I wrote an introductory post and called that “part 0”. I’ll explain why I didn’t just rename everything in footnote 4 in case you’re interested. [back]
2. The report is available more broadly via the OU’s Open Research Online repository: Virtual Museum Tours for Schools: Teachers’ Experiences and Expectations. The official link to the article is http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1109/EDUCON52537.2022.9766548, but that’s only accessible if you have an academic login. [back]
3. Reference: Aristeidou, Maria; Kouvara, Theodora; Karachristos, Christoforos; Spyropoulou, Natalia; Benavides-Lahnstein, Ana; Vulicevic, Bojana; Lacapelle, Alexis; Orphanoudakis, Theofanis and Batsi, Zoe (2022). Virtual Museum Tours for Schools: Teachers’ Experiences and Expectations. In: 2022 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON) (Kallel, Ilhem; Kammoun, Habib M. and Hsari, Lobna eds.), 28-21 Mar 2022, Tunis, Tunisia, pp. 201–209. [back]
4. Labelled “part 2”: I wanted to keep the post numberings in line with the numberings in the list of outcomes but then needed to add an extra post at the beginning (see footnote 1) and everything got a bit out of hand. Just see it as a brief lesson in counting like a mathematician and everything will be fine in the end. [back]
5. Labelled “part 1”: see footnote 4. [back]