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What does the future hold for museums as they face some of the biggest challenges and the most exciting opportunities in their history?
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I'm Carol Scott, and this podcast series is Museums, the Big Issues.
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Join me as we bring the big issues and the big ideas together with some of the very best thinkers and practitioners in the field.
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Together, we'll look at how we build a sustainable future for museums in these uncertain times.
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So today we're exploring an exciting project that uses digital technology to connect objects with people.
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In doing this, it is creating new opportunities for cross-cultural understanding.
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To discuss this innovative work, I'm joined by Dr.
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Heather Gaunt from the University of Melbourne.
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Heather, you're a specialist in museum university collections, and you're leading an international classroom project linking health humanities students in several countries with university and art museum collections.
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This work is seminal.
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Your publication list is long, and you've been recognized with multiple awards, including the 2024 Dyson Fellowship from the University of Melbourne.
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Heather, welcome to Museums, The Big Issues.
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Thank you very much, Carol.
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It's great to be here.
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Heather, you're leading on the Intercultural Heritage Global Classroom.
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Can you briefly describe this project and what you and your international partners are aiming to achieve?
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Yes, Carol, what's really interesting about the intercultural aspect of this project is the opportunity to bring our cultural collections from the different international universities together in one classroom learning environment.
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And obviously the opportunity that we have in the digital space is that we can do this.
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Our core goal, because we're working within a university context, is to give our university students who are studying in different international university environments the opportunity to have internationalized curriculum or global learning opportunities.
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This is a mandate for so many of our universities now around the world to provide these types of experiences for students.
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It's no longer okay to just deliver a curriculum that is very locally focused in most cases.
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And of course, we're talking about museum-based learning in universities, which is beyond the sort of obvious subjects which you might typically think come to museums, like art curatorship or art history, conservation, those sorts of subjects, but also more broadly the health sciences subjects, engineering, law, other areas where students can use environments that the sort of rich, immersive experiential environments that university museums offer to students.
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So the opportunity in the digital space is that we can integrate multiple collections, multiple international contexts for culture, society, the way universities work, the way students learn into this one space.
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So it's an incredibly exciting moment for us within the universities as a group of experts who use our cultural collections in these ways to do it in a really collaborative way for a sort of shared goal of learning.
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Which countries are you working with in this project?
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I have been working closely with a number of universities, and initially all were universities who are part of what's called Universitess 21, which is a consortium of universities around the world who have made commitments to intercultural collaboration and to providing unique and enriched experiences for students and for researchers, this sort of international collaboration.
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So Universitess 21 provided us with a context and a shared communication around multiple universities to initiate a shared collaborative learning model.
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So some of the universities that I've been working with specifically have been the University of Hong Kong, National University of Singapore, the University Tech de Monterrey in Mexico, Lund University in Sweden, Glasgow University, Edinburgh.
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There's many, there's universities in Chile, so there's around 29 universities in the Universitas 21 consortium.
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Not all of them have very active object-based learning or museum-based tertiary education.
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But one of the goals, in fact, of our working group in this Universitas 21 context is to promote this type of engagement, both in physical face-to-face contexts in university museums, but also to explore these new opportunities to teach together with our shared collections across the multiple universities.
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So it's really a growing consortium of partners who are very interested in this space.
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Some partners, for example, Tech de Monterey, have much more expertise in the international global learning curriculum in general.
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Others, for example, here at the University of Melbourne, we have decades of expertise in the museum-based physical learning.
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Across all the partners, there's different levels of experience, different numbers of museums based on those sites.
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And so we can share and learn together and provide each other with that support to build this sort of new innovative tertiary methodology.
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Come on, you're using museum objects delivered through what you call collaborative online international learning.
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Now, can you explain how you chose the objects for this project and how the online learning methodology works in practice?
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Absolutely.
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And I and I have to say, for me, this has been a really interesting learning curve over the last five years or so, because while I have a many decades of experience in working in university-based museums and with an educational focus, particularly for tertiary students, I hadn't done a lot of teaching in the online space with museum objects really until the pandemic.
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Not only to our everyday lives, but also to our teaching practices.
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And so we had to understand and to gain new skills in how we were going to transfer our practices of museum-based experiential learning into an online environment.
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So for me, this was a real trigger to think about the practices, the most effective ways to engage students, most effective ways to integrate our collections into these environments and then to be able to deliver programs.
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And so the Universitas 21 Network that I mentioned was the start of us thinking as a group about what that methodology might be.
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So fortunately, COIL, or as you said, collaborative online international learning, is a practice, is a pedagogical methodology which is very well recognised, in which there has been increasing amounts of research, particularly in the last decade.
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And it just there's more and more investigation into the effectiveness of this type of approach.
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And essentially it's an approach that can be used in any discipline.
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And the goals of COIL tend to be around internationalizing curriculum, providing students with sustainable opportunities to gain global learning experiences without having to physically leave their museum, sorry, their university context.
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Because as you can imagine, this is a very unequal field for different university students and universities around the world to be able to access international opportunities.
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So COIL is a solution that many academics around the world have come to, and essentially it means that you are matching your curriculum with at least one other international university, which in itself is quite a challenge, as you imagine, both in terms of how the curriculum sits within the year, but also the time of day, the time zone differences.
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But essentially, you are creating partnerships with other academics from at least one, as I said, other university where you agree to teach at least a component of a subject or a course in this online way that you will teach at least some of that course synchronously.
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So at the same time, students are together in an online space, and you will build a degree of project work for the students to engage in so that they have to do collaborative teamwork in this international teamwork context.
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And these are really key elements of COIL.
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So the uh so just to reiterate again, you have students learning together from multiple international universities over a period of typically four to six weeks.
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They will have some project that they achieve together in small teams and have an output.
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Classic COIL is also assessed and is part of the students' grades and receives credit or accreditation for their degrees.
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So the innovation that we worked towards as professionals and as academics based in university museums was to think how can we actually bring our object-based learning, experiential learning practice into this sort of coil learning environment?
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And that's the real innovation.
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So we even had to come up with an idea.
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So we said, okay, it's called virtual object-based learning.
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That was just the term that we coined in the end, so that we could try to explain it to other museum professionals and also other academics in other countries.
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It's a very interesting space to be sitting in.
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So you're saying you asked how we chose the objects for this type of project and this type of learning.
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And this is a really fascinating and crucial part of the process, as you can imagine.
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I want you to think about what happens in a single museum in a physical space when you plan a class with students.
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There's a process of conversation with the academic who is bringing their students into the museum to consider what the intended learning outcomes or the curriculum goals are for that session.
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And then you typically will offer a range of objects to that academic and you discuss together what are the thinking prompts that emerge from students examining those objects closely?
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What do we want students to be learning through this experience?
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Is it about activating their emotional responses to objects and becoming more engaged with how they feel about ideas or objects?
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Is it about specific information that they can gain from examination of, say, an ancient text or a complex contemporary artwork?
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So it's deciding exactly what you want as an outcome from the class.
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So you take those principles and you put them into the virtual learning environment.
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So therefore, you have a COIL, a collaborative online international learning curriculum.
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We in our in our work have decided to use the UNESCO Sustainable Development Goals as an underlying theme for our curriculum, which allows us, just helps to shape what is going to happen over those weeks of learning together in a really clear way.
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And then we consider what is available from each of the university sites that offers the complexity of ideas, the evocative sort of emotive response that students will have to physical objects in the museum, and we hope we'll also have to virtual objects or surrogates, digital surrogates as we call them, of these objects, and how the collections work together.
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So if we're, for example, wanting students to think in a UNESCO context about ideas of, let's say, global health.
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So we might choose objects that reflect local instances of people's experience of health to do with, for example, climate or pollution or the complexities of the local hospital system, access to benefits that apply to their how well their health is sustained in that local context.
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So it's a complicated but really fascinating part of the process.
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Essentially, you are curating a group of objects from around the world to serve as vehicles for students' engagement towards the object towards the goal of the course.
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That's a sort of broad description of what we do.
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Of course, the nuance of it depends very much on the specific course you're teaching.
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What are the objects in each of the university collections?
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What are the strengths of those collections that you should draw upon?
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You know, Heather, that that's really very interesting.
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And you you used a term digital surrogates, and I just want to drill into that one a little bit because in some of your papers you talk about the advantages and the disadvantages of using digital surrogates rather than the real object.
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So what are some of these advantages and disadvantages?
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It's a really fascinating area, and I think we all can, or at least I know that I make certain assumptions about what is going to be an interesting experience with a digital object, and it may not, in fact, necessarily be what happens for the student.
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So we've done a lot of research in delivering these global classrooms in the last couple of years to understand more deeply what the experience of a digital surrogate is for a student.
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So a digital digital surrogate is essentially, in simplest forms, a digitized version of that object that you have in a physical museum context that you can access in a simple online format.
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The assumption being that students are going to experience our virtual classrooms with their laptop.
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I mean, a worst case scenario, they might even be looking on their phone.
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But we have to think about how we're going to provide access to a physical collection or an object in essentially a two-dimensional screen, like a computer screen.
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So then, of course, you can imagine we would have high-resolution images, a 2D image, we're all so familiar with accessing collections in their way, or it might be an image that is rendered in three dimensions through a process like photogrammetry, where we're capturing images in terms of creating the digital surrogate through photogrammetry, you're capturing an image of every side of an object.
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Let's say it's a three-dimensional sculpture, you're going to be taking many, many photos and stitching them together of the entire surface of the object.
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There are other ways to create digital surrogates, as you can imagine, with perhaps a film or even a video walkthrough is a in some ways a digital surrogate of an experience of an exhibition.
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But in virtual object-based learning, if we think of the core context of object-based learning meaning a close engagement with a single object, therefore the use of either a simple 2D high-res photo that you can magnify, zoom in on your screen, or a 3D photogrammetry object that has been acquired through photogrammetry, which you can then rotate.
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And so we could talk more about what our findings are about those students' experiences of those objects, if you like.
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Yeah, that would be very interesting.
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Yeah.
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So I found that most students were very comfortable with both 2 and 3D virtual versions or digital surrogates during the classes.
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The downsides were mostly to do with the bandwidth that students could access to download images or to access images live.
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They actually don't have to download them in our program.
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We are very simply using a platform where they're looking at them via a tool like Padlet, which is an online collaborative tool, or through a program which we have at the University of Melbourne called Pedestal 3D, where they open a screen and they're able to access the object in a virtual context, but they actually don't download onto their computer.
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So in most instances, students were able to easily manipulate and to look at the objects.
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So the technology wasn't an issue, which is we were really concerned about that being a challenge for the learning.
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And in fact, the there was from different students a different degree of interest in the 2D as compared to the 3D objects.
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So for many of our students, particularly those who are not coming from an arts or you know, humanities background, they found the experience of looking at these museum objects in a guided way in our shared classroom just so exciting.
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They said to us overtly that they didn't find that the virtual version of the object was any less engaging than it would have been if they had walked into a museum.
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They were just really excited to be in a virtual space in which they were sharing these wonderful objects and being able to talk about the objects with experts and with their peers, international peers.
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Some students talked about the excitement, however, that they found from working with the three-dimensional object, partly because there are advantages to doing that that actually outweigh the experience of seeing the object in a museum.
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So if you imagine you're standing looking at an amazing Ming vase from the University of Hong Kong, and in a museum you are literally only able to see the side of the object, which is enabled by your stance in the museum itself.
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You've got a barrier between you and the object, it's probably behind glass, you can't move it at all.
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Whereas in the virtual space, you can turn it over, you can rotate around all sides, you can look at the texture on the surface, all those sort of obvious ways in which a virtual object can give you a greater access, even though you have reduced haptic access, in other words, you have less of the touch senses that you might gain from working with an object that you can touch in a museum.
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Instead, you have the opportunity to really manipulate it without the concern of handling, for example, a really fragile object that maybe you're not allowed to touch.
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We found that there were some interesting conversations about the experience of a 3D object being in some ways inappropriate for some objects, though, which was a really interesting finding.
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So again, if we imagine a contemporary artwork or perhaps a large historic vessel that we know, let's let's imagine the very large historic vessel, which is say um 60 centimetres high, very heavy, not something that we would typically be able to lift and look around.
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So, in some ways, the virtual representation of that object misrepresented the physical nature of the original and would therefore give you perhaps the wrong sense of its use in the past, what it was created for, how it might have been used.
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So if we think about the practice of object-based learning, in some instances it's about that really close investigation and making students do the work to understand, for example, the heritage of that object and why it might have been created, how it might have been used in a particular culture.
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So the physical aspect of the object, the materiality of it, is a really crucial part of that learning journey.
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So if you take that away and instead you provide students with a 3D access to that same object, which you can manipulate any way you like.
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You can zoom it in, you can make it huge, you can make it small, you can look at it upside down.
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That of course isn't going to happen with the real object.
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So it's actually not the it's it's changing the learning journey with the object that you would have had if you had looked at it in a museum.
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So it's it's just it's different in many ways.
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And that's what I think we're finding in a really interesting way with global classroom as we use more and more objects, as we digitize more objects and utilize them in classes with different students from different disciplines.
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There's so many ways in which that virtual environment shifts up our understanding of not only the object itself, but how we can actually utilize it in a teaching and learning context.
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And how how is this helping intercultural dialogue among audiences in different countries?
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A very different topic, of course, because we've been talking very much about the technologies of delivering a virtual-based learning.
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But the core idea of an international learning experience using virtual objects, the international is at the heart of it.
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So it's a chance to share cultural material in real time with peers, in the case of students or fellow collaborators when we're developing the classroom.
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In real time, we have that chance to share our own interpretations of those objects.
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Say, if we're thinking about what the student's experience would be, they are able to see what their peers' emotional response is to a diversity of artifacts, what they know culturally about them, or don't know, what are some of the assumptions, for example, that they might make about that object, how, for example, it was used in certain historical sociological contexts, or how people might have responded to it in as a work of art in the present day, for example.
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So you're having this chance to do a number of things at once, to look at potentially unfamiliar material, to do it with peers who may or may know, may not know about this material from their own context, to be guided by experts who are who know about these objects from different contexts and who have are able to share in real time these sort of differences of opinions and different um interpretations of the material.
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It's a really live environment, it's just fantastic.
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And and at the same time, the objects themselves evoke a strong emotional and intellectual response.
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So everybody's very engaged.
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And so that that's the sort of object-based learning aspect of it.
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And what we then are able to draw on for the for the for the sort of university tertiary education focused part of it, or the learning part of it, is to think about what those differences and similarities of cultural response tell us about who we are as human beings.
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Because the objects have been created by individuals, by artists, by craftspeople at different times in history, different places around the world.
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So we have direct access to this incredible, I guess, uh understanding of the world.
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But we're we're exploring it in real time with other peers.
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And so therefore, um, built in with reflective activities, which we always incorporate as part of these learning sessions, where we take apart what has happened in the classroom or the many weeks of the project, we reflect on that, reflect on what we've learned as individuals from having to collaborate with peers for with hearing other people's perspectives on cultural material that we either didn't know a lot about or we feel like we did.
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We become more humble in our understanding of our own understanding of each other and of our cultures, and we become more open to other people's perspectives.
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So it's a very um it's a very non-hierarchical inclusive space that you can create with purpose in these sorts of environments.
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So, Heather, in thinking about all of the you know, sort of very positive things that have come out of this project that you've just identified, in your opinion, how transferable do you think this model would be to museum education programs, you know, in public museums who might want to foster some sort of cross-cultural understanding and dialogue, maybe across borders?
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I think it's a it's a very, very transferable methodology.
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And if we think it at the basic level, what we're doing, uh peers who are listening to this program who undertake this sort of learning in their own museums, will I think be able to easily step into thinking about what they could do to take it into a virtual space.
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And I think the opportunity is for uh access to larger audiences, and this is something that we all found, I think, in COVID, didn't we, when we had to put our programs online and suddenly we had thousands of people who may physically have never been able to get to the museum before are able to come to these sessions and see our collections.
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I think what the nuance of the explicit learning program is, though, that we give our participants time to engage and to learn together.
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So it's not a one-way delivery of information about our collections, for example, in an online environment.
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What it is is a session in which we deliberately set up opportunities for small numbers of people to interact together, to explore objects together, to compare them from multiple international sites, or even if it's just one museum, it could be choosing a small selection of your objects that are quite diverse, putting them into a virtual learning context and inviting people to go on a learning journey with you, but to give them the time to have the conversations with peers about the objects and to learn as they go.
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This is the sort of object-based learning methodology.
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But then, if they have the chance to partner with other institutions, either in their own in their own country contexts or internationally, then that immediately opens up the chance to enlarge the diversity of collections that are brought into that classroom, to be really deliberate about choosing objects that speak to specific local contexts that you want the conversation to be around, and then to bring in the expertise of those multiple international institutions to join that learning experience.
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And I think they're the real key factors.
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And if we're, I think one of the benefits that we've found from the really simple curriculum model of that we have actually used now over multiple different classroom settings of using these UNESCO SDGs as a as a basic uh idea for the curriculum, then it becomes really simple because you could, for example, theme a session which is open to the public on, for example, life underwater, and you have multiple collections or let's say two or three other international organizations that join your online learning experience.
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They bring in, say, six or seven key objects that the curators think would provoke really interesting reflections about life underwater in the local context.
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And then you create a context in which, for example, you've got 16 key objects, eight or nine drawn from a different each different institution, you've got one expert from each institution, and then you have um, let's say, a capped group of 30 people from each of the sites.
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And then you create breakout rooms where the where the people can have peer-to-peer discussions about different objects.
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Think about it in the context of the uh the imperative that of the SDG, in this case, you know, life underwater, and then to come back and share their own findings.
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Because I think that's a really important aspect of it, to give participants the opportunity to just speak about what they discovered from their investigation of the object in the real time of the classroom with others.
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Because one of the key principles of shared object-based learning experiences is it's very much about building meaning together.
00:29:24.640 --> 00:29:30.240
It's not a one-way delivery from a lecturer, it's not a single student going off and doing a research essay.
00:29:30.400 --> 00:29:45.279
It's a it's a conversation between genuinely interested people, triggered and made richer by the art or the cultural artifact that they're discussing together, and then the chance to share it with others and hear their perspectives.
00:29:45.440 --> 00:29:50.079
And that's where you bring in every all these different really rich factors of the experience.
00:29:50.400 --> 00:30:00.400
And finally, Heather, and maybe just briefly, what skills do you think museum professionals need to manage a process like this and conduct these conversations?
00:30:01.519 --> 00:30:16.480
I think it's really important to do some reading and training in what is going to work well in intercultural discussions and where things are likely to be challenging or to come unstuck, perhaps.
00:30:16.640 --> 00:30:29.039
The sort of skills that you need to guide conversations with people who don't know each other and who are being asked to consider really big ideas about culture, about bias, about perspectives.
00:30:29.759 --> 00:30:39.359
You need to have those sorts of ground rules and confidence in being able to run these sorts of engagements.
00:30:39.599 --> 00:30:57.279
So there's lots of material out there, and in fact, I think the first point of call would be your local museum education team who would already be aware of the sort of parameters around safe discussions, safe and productive discussions with uh complex material.
00:30:57.839 --> 00:31:02.400
There's so much research and information out there around how to run these sorts of sessions.
00:31:02.640 --> 00:31:11.920
And just the fact that as an online environment, you have to be particularly careful around what people are comfortable to do in that space as well.
00:31:12.079 --> 00:31:19.680
So even as simple things like having your camera on or off is something to think about when you first start the session.
00:31:19.839 --> 00:31:33.200
Many people will be uncomfortable about having their camera on maybe with 30 others, whereas they might be comfortable if they're put in a breakout group with four others to have their camera on so that they can have a discussion.
00:31:33.440 --> 00:31:50.720
It might be even just a matter of making sure everybody puts their names or the name they're comfortable with into their Zoom name so that people can easily know how to refer to someone in the conversation.
00:31:50.960 --> 00:31:57.839
Because it's so easy, isn't it, to make assumptions about what people will be comfortable or uncomfortable with in this sort of virtual space.
00:31:58.079 --> 00:32:11.200
Um and we certainly that that's cultural safety and and the making sure that everybody is feeling safe and comfortable in that environment to be able to contribute is really significant.
00:32:11.599 --> 00:32:15.200
Thank you, Heather, for sharing this pioneering project with us.
00:32:15.440 --> 00:32:26.000
In the show notes accompanying this podcast, you can find links to Heather's papers in which she and her co-authors elaborate on the project, its outcomes, and the methodology.
00:32:26.640 --> 00:32:29.359
Now, next week we move on to another topic.
00:32:29.519 --> 00:32:31.839
We're going to start talking about social impact.
00:32:32.079 --> 00:32:38.559
And we'll be exploring the role which museums are playing in the public domain and the social difference which they can make.
00:32:38.880 --> 00:32:41.119
Our first guest on this theme will be Dr.
00:32:41.200 --> 00:32:42.319
Sasha Prieux.
00:32:42.720 --> 00:32:50.160
And the topic will be museums and a new model for cultural diplomacy, which engages with controversial issues.
00:32:50.480 --> 00:32:56.319
I'm Carl Scott, and thank you for listening to this episode of Museums the Big Issues.
00:32:56.559 --> 00:33:05.599
Join me next Wednesday as we continue to explore the big issues and the big ideas with the people helping to shape the future of museums.
00:00:01.199 --> 00:00:10.080
What does the future hold for museums as they face some of the biggest challenges and the most exciting opportunities in their history?
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I'm Carol Scott, and this podcast series is Museums, the Big Issues.
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Join me as we bring the big issues and the big ideas together with some of the very best thinkers and practitioners in the field.
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Together, we'll look at how we build a sustainable future for museums in these uncertain times.
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So today we're exploring an exciting project that uses digital technology to connect objects with people.
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In doing this, it is creating new opportunities for cross-cultural understanding.
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To discuss this innovative work, I'm joined by Dr.
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Heather Gaunt from the University of Melbourne.
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Heather, you're a specialist in museum university collections, and you're leading an international classroom project linking health humanities students in several countries with university and art museum collections.
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This work is seminal.
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Your publication list is long, and you've been recognized with multiple awards, including the 2024 Dyson Fellowship from the University of Melbourne.
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Heather, welcome to Museums, The Big Issues.
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Thank you very much, Carol.
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It's great to be here.
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Heather, you're leading on the Intercultural Heritage Global Classroom.
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Can you briefly describe this project and what you and your international partners are aiming to achieve?
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Yes, Carol, what's really interesting about the intercultural aspect of this project is the opportunity to bring our cultural collections from the different international universities together in one classroom learning environment.
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And obviously the opportunity that we have in the digital space is that we can do this.
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Our core goal, because we're working within a university context, is to give our university students who are studying in different international university environments the opportunity to have internationalized curriculum or global learning opportunities.
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This is a mandate for so many of our universities now around the world to provide these types of experiences for students.
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It's no longer okay to just deliver a curriculum that is very locally focused in most cases.
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And of course, we're talking about museum-based learning in universities, which is beyond the sort of obvious subjects which you might typically think come to museums, like art curatorship or art history, conservation, those sorts of subjects, but also more broadly the health sciences subjects, engineering, law, other areas where students can use environments that the sort of rich, immersive experiential environments that university museums offer to students.
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So the opportunity in the digital space is that we can integrate multiple collections, multiple international contexts for culture, society, the way universities work, the way students learn into this one space.
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So it's an incredibly exciting moment for us within the universities as a group of experts who use our cultural collections in these ways to do it in a really collaborative way for a sort of shared goal of learning.
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Which countries are you working with in this project?
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I have been working closely with a number of universities, and initially all were universities who are part of what's called Universitess 21, which is a consortium of universities around the world who have made commitments to intercultural collaboration and to providing unique and enriched experiences for students and for researchers, this sort of international collaboration.
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So Universitess 21 provided us with a context and a shared communication around multiple universities to initiate a shared collaborative learning model.
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So some of the universities that I've been working with specifically have been the University of Hong Kong, National University of Singapore, the University Tech de Monterrey in Mexico, Lund University in Sweden, Glasgow University, Edinburgh.
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There's many, there's universities in Chile, so there's around 29 universities in the Universitas 21 consortium.
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Not all of them have very active object-based learning or museum-based tertiary education.
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But one of the goals, in fact, of our working group in this Universitas 21 context is to promote this type of engagement, both in physical face-to-face contexts in university museums, but also to explore these new opportunities to teach together with our shared collections across the multiple universities.
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So it's really a growing consortium of partners who are very interested in this space.
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Some partners, for example, Tech de Monterey, have much more expertise in the international global learning curriculum in general.
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Others, for example, here at the University of Melbourne, we have decades of expertise in the museum-based physical learning.
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Across all the partners, there's different levels of experience, different numbers of museums based on those sites.
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And so we can share and learn together and provide each other with that support to build this sort of new innovative tertiary methodology.
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Come on, you're using museum objects delivered through what you call collaborative online international learning.
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Now, can you explain how you chose the objects for this project and how the online learning methodology works in practice?
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Absolutely.
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And I and I have to say, for me, this has been a really interesting learning curve over the last five years or so, because while I have a many decades of experience in working in university-based museums and with an educational focus, particularly for tertiary students, I hadn't done a lot of teaching in the online space with museum objects really until the pandemic.
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Not only to our everyday lives, but also to our teaching practices.
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And so we had to understand and to gain new skills in how we were going to transfer our practices of museum-based experiential learning into an online environment.
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So for me, this was a real trigger to think about the practices, the most effective ways to engage students, most effective ways to integrate our collections into these environments and then to be able to deliver programs.
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And so the Universitas 21 Network that I mentioned was the start of us thinking as a group about what that methodology might be.
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So fortunately, COIL, or as you said, collaborative online international learning, is a practice, is a pedagogical methodology which is very well recognised, in which there has been increasing amounts of research, particularly in the last decade.
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And it just there's more and more investigation into the effectiveness of this type of approach.
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And essentially it's an approach that can be used in any discipline.
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And the goals of COIL tend to be around internationalizing curriculum, providing students with sustainable opportunities to gain global learning experiences without having to physically leave their museum, sorry, their university context.
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Because as you can imagine, this is a very unequal field for different university students and universities around the world to be able to access international opportunities.
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So COIL is a solution that many academics around the world have come to, and essentially it means that you are matching your curriculum with at least one other international university, which in itself is quite a challenge, as you imagine, both in terms of how the curriculum sits within the year, but also the time of day, the time zone differences.
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But essentially, you are creating partnerships with other academics from at least one, as I said, other university where you agree to teach at least a component of a subject or a course in this online way that you will teach at least some of that course synchronously.
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So at the same time, students are together in an online space, and you will build a degree of project work for the students to engage in so that they have to do collaborative teamwork in this international teamwork context.
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And these are really key elements of COIL.
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So the uh so just to reiterate again, you have students learning together from multiple international universities over a period of typically four to six weeks.
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They will have some project that they achieve together in small teams and have an output.
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Classic COIL is also assessed and is part of the students' grades and receives credit or accreditation for their degrees.
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So the innovation that we worked towards as professionals and as academics based in university museums was to think how can we actually bring our object-based learning, experiential learning practice into this sort of coil learning environment?
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And that's the real innovation.
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So we even had to come up with an idea.
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So we said, okay, it's called virtual object-based learning.
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That was just the term that we coined in the end, so that we could try to explain it to other museum professionals and also other academics in other countries.
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It's a very interesting space to be sitting in.
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So you're saying you asked how we chose the objects for this type of project and this type of learning.
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And this is a really fascinating and crucial part of the process, as you can imagine.
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I want you to think about what happens in a single museum in a physical space when you plan a class with students.
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There's a process of conversation with the academic who is bringing their students into the museum to consider what the intended learning outcomes or the curriculum goals are for that session.
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And then you typically will offer a range of objects to that academic and you discuss together what are the thinking prompts that emerge from students examining those objects closely?
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What do we want students to be learning through this experience?
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Is it about activating their emotional responses to objects and becoming more engaged with how they feel about ideas or objects?
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Is it about specific information that they can gain from examination of, say, an ancient text or a complex contemporary artwork?
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So it's deciding exactly what you want as an outcome from the class.
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So you take those principles and you put them into the virtual learning environment.
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So therefore, you have a COIL, a collaborative online international learning curriculum.
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We in our in our work have decided to use the UNESCO Sustainable Development Goals as an underlying theme for our curriculum, which allows us, just helps to shape what is going to happen over those weeks of learning together in a really clear way.
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And then we consider what is available from each of the university sites that offers the complexity of ideas, the evocative sort of emotive response that students will have to physical objects in the museum, and we hope we'll also have to virtual objects or surrogates, digital surrogates as we call them, of these objects, and how the collections work together.
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So if we're, for example, wanting students to think in a UNESCO context about ideas of, let's say, global health.
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So we might choose objects that reflect local instances of people's experience of health to do with, for example, climate or pollution or the complexities of the local hospital system, access to benefits that apply to their how well their health is sustained in that local context.
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So it's a complicated but really fascinating part of the process.
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Essentially, you are curating a group of objects from around the world to serve as vehicles for students' engagement towards the object towards the goal of the course.
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That's a sort of broad description of what we do.
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Of course, the nuance of it depends very much on the specific course you're teaching.
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What are the objects in each of the university collections?
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What are the strengths of those collections that you should draw upon?
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You know, Heather, that that's really very interesting.
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And you you used a term digital surrogates, and I just want to drill into that one a little bit because in some of your papers you talk about the advantages and the disadvantages of using digital surrogates rather than the real object.
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So what are some of these advantages and disadvantages?
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It's a really fascinating area, and I think we all can, or at least I know that I make certain assumptions about what is going to be an interesting experience with a digital object, and it may not, in fact, necessarily be what happens for the student.
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So we've done a lot of research in delivering these global classrooms in the last couple of years to understand more deeply what the experience of a digital surrogate is for a student.
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So a digital digital surrogate is essentially, in simplest forms, a digitized version of that object that you have in a physical museum context that you can access in a simple online format.
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The assumption being that students are going to experience our virtual classrooms with their laptop.
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I mean, a worst case scenario, they might even be looking on their phone.
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But we have to think about how we're going to provide access to a physical collection or an object in essentially a two-dimensional screen, like a computer screen.
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So then, of course, you can imagine we would have high-resolution images, a 2D image, we're all so familiar with accessing collections in their way, or it might be an image that is rendered in three dimensions through a process like photogrammetry, where we're capturing images in terms of creating the digital surrogate through photogrammetry, you're capturing an image of every side of an object.
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Let's say it's a three-dimensional sculpture, you're going to be taking many, many photos and stitching them together of the entire surface of the object.
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There are other ways to create digital surrogates, as you can imagine, with perhaps a film or even a video walkthrough is a in some ways a digital surrogate of an experience of an exhibition.
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But in virtual object-based learning, if we think of the core context of object-based learning meaning a close engagement with a single object, therefore the use of either a simple 2D high-res photo that you can magnify, zoom in on your screen, or a 3D photogrammetry object that has been acquired through photogrammetry, which you can then rotate.
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And so we could talk more about what our findings are about those students' experiences of those objects, if you like.
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Yeah, that would be very interesting.
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Yeah.
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So I found that most students were very comfortable with both 2 and 3D virtual versions or digital surrogates during the classes.
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The downsides were mostly to do with the bandwidth that students could access to download images or to access images live.
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They actually don't have to download them in our program.
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We are very simply using a platform where they're looking at them via a tool like Padlet, which is an online collaborative tool, or through a program which we have at the University of Melbourne called Pedestal 3D, where they open a screen and they're able to access the object in a virtual context, but they actually don't download onto their computer.
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So in most instances, students were able to easily manipulate and to look at the objects.
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So the technology wasn't an issue, which is we were really concerned about that being a challenge for the learning.
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And in fact, the there was from different students a different degree of interest in the 2D as compared to the 3D objects.
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So for many of our students, particularly those who are not coming from an arts or you know, humanities background, they found the experience of looking at these museum objects in a guided way in our shared classroom just so exciting.
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They said to us overtly that they didn't find that the virtual version of the object was any less engaging than it would have been if they had walked into a museum.
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They were just really excited to be in a virtual space in which they were sharing these wonderful objects and being able to talk about the objects with experts and with their peers, international peers.
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Some students talked about the excitement, however, that they found from working with the three-dimensional object, partly because there are advantages to doing that that actually outweigh the experience of seeing the object in a museum.
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So if you imagine you're standing looking at an amazing Ming vase from the University of Hong Kong, and in a museum you are literally only able to see the side of the object, which is enabled by your stance in the museum itself.
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You've got a barrier between you and the object, it's probably behind glass, you can't move it at all.
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Whereas in the virtual space, you can turn it over, you can rotate around all sides, you can look at the texture on the surface, all those sort of obvious ways in which a virtual object can give you a greater access, even though you have reduced haptic access, in other words, you have less of the touch senses that you might gain from working with an object that you can touch in a museum.
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Instead, you have the opportunity to really manipulate it without the concern of handling, for example, a really fragile object that maybe you're not allowed to touch.
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We found that there were some interesting conversations about the experience of a 3D object being in some ways inappropriate for some objects, though, which was a really interesting finding.
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So again, if we imagine a contemporary artwork or perhaps a large historic vessel that we know, let's let's imagine the very large historic vessel, which is say um 60 centimetres high, very heavy, not something that we would typically be able to lift and look around.
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So, in some ways, the virtual representation of that object misrepresented the physical nature of the original and would therefore give you perhaps the wrong sense of its use in the past, what it was created for, how it might have been used.
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So if we think about the practice of object-based learning, in some instances it's about that really close investigation and making students do the work to understand, for example, the heritage of that object and why it might have been created, how it might have been used in a particular culture.
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So the physical aspect of the object, the materiality of it, is a really crucial part of that learning journey.
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So if you take that away and instead you provide students with a 3D access to that same object, which you can manipulate any way you like.
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You can zoom it in, you can make it huge, you can make it small, you can look at it upside down.
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That of course isn't going to happen with the real object.
00:20:36.799 --> 00:20:49.200
So it's actually not the it's it's changing the learning journey with the object that you would have had if you had looked at it in a museum.
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So it's it's just it's different in many ways.
00:20:52.160 --> 00:21:05.599
And that's what I think we're finding in a really interesting way with global classroom as we use more and more objects, as we digitize more objects and utilize them in classes with different students from different disciplines.
00:21:05.839 --> 00:21:16.160
There's so many ways in which that virtual environment shifts up our understanding of not only the object itself, but how we can actually utilize it in a teaching and learning context.
00:21:16.559 --> 00:21:23.359
And how how is this helping intercultural dialogue among audiences in different countries?
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A very different topic, of course, because we've been talking very much about the technologies of delivering a virtual-based learning.
00:21:33.440 --> 00:21:43.839
But the core idea of an international learning experience using virtual objects, the international is at the heart of it.
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So it's a chance to share cultural material in real time with peers, in the case of students or fellow collaborators when we're developing the classroom.
00:22:00.400 --> 00:22:05.359
In real time, we have that chance to share our own interpretations of those objects.
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Say, if we're thinking about what the student's experience would be, they are able to see what their peers' emotional response is to a diversity of artifacts, what they know culturally about them, or don't know, what are some of the assumptions, for example, that they might make about that object, how, for example, it was used in certain historical sociological contexts, or how people might have responded to it in as a work of art in the present day, for example.
00:22:36.559 --> 00:23:08.319
So you're having this chance to do a number of things at once, to look at potentially unfamiliar material, to do it with peers who may or may know, may not know about this material from their own context, to be guided by experts who are who know about these objects from different contexts and who have are able to share in real time these sort of differences of opinions and different um interpretations of the material.
00:23:08.480 --> 00:23:11.359
It's a really live environment, it's just fantastic.
00:23:11.599 --> 00:23:20.799
And and at the same time, the objects themselves evoke a strong emotional and intellectual response.
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So everybody's very engaged.
00:23:23.839 --> 00:23:26.880
And so that that's the sort of object-based learning aspect of it.
00:23:27.039 --> 00:23:47.119
And what we then are able to draw on for the for the for the sort of university tertiary education focused part of it, or the learning part of it, is to think about what those differences and similarities of cultural response tell us about who we are as human beings.
00:23:47.440 --> 00:23:57.839
Because the objects have been created by individuals, by artists, by craftspeople at different times in history, different places around the world.
00:23:58.000 --> 00:24:06.480
So we have direct access to this incredible, I guess, uh understanding of the world.
00:24:06.640 --> 00:24:10.160
But we're we're exploring it in real time with other peers.
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And so therefore, um, built in with reflective activities, which we always incorporate as part of these learning sessions, where we take apart what has happened in the classroom or the many weeks of the project, we reflect on that, reflect on what we've learned as individuals from having to collaborate with peers for with hearing other people's perspectives on cultural material that we either didn't know a lot about or we feel like we did.
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We become more humble in our understanding of our own understanding of each other and of our cultures, and we become more open to other people's perspectives.
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So it's a very um it's a very non-hierarchical inclusive space that you can create with purpose in these sorts of environments.
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So, Heather, in thinking about all of the you know, sort of very positive things that have come out of this project that you've just identified, in your opinion, how transferable do you think this model would be to museum education programs, you know, in public museums who might want to foster some sort of cross-cultural understanding and dialogue, maybe across borders?
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I think it's a it's a very, very transferable methodology.
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And if we think it at the basic level, what we're doing, uh peers who are listening to this program who undertake this sort of learning in their own museums, will I think be able to easily step into thinking about what they could do to take it into a virtual space.
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And I think the opportunity is for uh access to larger audiences, and this is something that we all found, I think, in COVID, didn't we, when we had to put our programs online and suddenly we had thousands of people who may physically have never been able to get to the museum before are able to come to these sessions and see our collections.
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I think what the nuance of the explicit learning program is, though, that we give our participants time to engage and to learn together.
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So it's not a one-way delivery of information about our collections, for example, in an online environment.
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What it is is a session in which we deliberately set up opportunities for small numbers of people to interact together, to explore objects together, to compare them from multiple international sites, or even if it's just one museum, it could be choosing a small selection of your objects that are quite diverse, putting them into a virtual learning context and inviting people to go on a learning journey with you, but to give them the time to have the conversations with peers about the objects and to learn as they go.
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This is the sort of object-based learning methodology.
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But then, if they have the chance to partner with other institutions, either in their own in their own country contexts or internationally, then that immediately opens up the chance to enlarge the diversity of collections that are brought into that classroom, to be really deliberate about choosing objects that speak to specific local contexts that you want the conversation to be around, and then to bring in the expertise of those multiple international institutions to join that learning experience.
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And I think they're the real key factors.
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And if we're, I think one of the benefits that we've found from the really simple curriculum model of that we have actually used now over multiple different classroom settings of using these UNESCO SDGs as a as a basic uh idea for the curriculum, then it becomes really simple because you could, for example, theme a session which is open to the public on, for example, life underwater, and you have multiple collections or let's say two or three other international organizations that join your online learning experience.
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They bring in, say, six or seven key objects that the curators think would provoke really interesting reflections about life underwater in the local context.
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And then you create a context in which, for example, you've got 16 key objects, eight or nine drawn from a different each different institution, you've got one expert from each institution, and then you have um, let's say, a capped group of 30 people from each of the sites.
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And then you create breakout rooms where the where the people can have peer-to-peer discussions about different objects.
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Think about it in the context of the uh the imperative that of the SDG, in this case, you know, life underwater, and then to come back and share their own findings.
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Because I think that's a really important aspect of it, to give participants the opportunity to just speak about what they discovered from their investigation of the object in the real time of the classroom with others.
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Because one of the key principles of shared object-based learning experiences is it's very much about building meaning together.
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It's not a one-way delivery from a lecturer, it's not a single student going off and doing a research essay.
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It's a it's a conversation between genuinely interested people, triggered and made richer by the art or the cultural artifact that they're discussing together, and then the chance to share it with others and hear their perspectives.
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And that's where you bring in every all these different really rich factors of the experience.
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And finally, Heather, and maybe just briefly, what skills do you think museum professionals need to manage a process like this and conduct these conversations?
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I think it's really important to do some reading and training in what is going to work well in intercultural discussions and where things are likely to be challenging or to come unstuck, perhaps.
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The sort of skills that you need to guide conversations with people who don't know each other and who are being asked to consider really big ideas about culture, about bias, about perspectives.
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You need to have those sorts of ground rules and confidence in being able to run these sorts of engagements.
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So there's lots of material out there, and in fact, I think the first point of call would be your local museum education team who would already be aware of the sort of parameters around safe discussions, safe and productive discussions with uh complex material.
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There's so much research and information out there around how to run these sorts of sessions.
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And just the fact that as an online environment, you have to be particularly careful around what people are comfortable to do in that space as well.
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So even as simple things like having your camera on or off is something to think about when you first start the session.
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Many people will be uncomfortable about having their camera on maybe with 30 others, whereas they might be comfortable if they're put in a breakout group with four others to have their camera on so that they can have a discussion.
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It might be even just a matter of making sure everybody puts their names or the name they're comfortable with into their Zoom name so that people can easily know how to refer to someone in the conversation.
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Because it's so easy, isn't it, to make assumptions about what people will be comfortable or uncomfortable with in this sort of virtual space.
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Um and we certainly that that's cultural safety and and the making sure that everybody is feeling safe and comfortable in that environment to be able to contribute is really significant.
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Thank you, Heather, for sharing this pioneering project with us.
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In the show notes accompanying this podcast, you can find links to Heather's papers in which she and her co-authors elaborate on the project, its outcomes, and the methodology.
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Now, next week we move on to another topic.
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We're going to start talking about social impact.
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And we'll be exploring the role which museums are playing in the public domain and the social difference which they can make.
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Our first guest on this theme will be Dr.
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Sasha Prieux.
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And the topic will be museums and a new model for cultural diplomacy, which engages with controversial issues.
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I'm Carl Scott, and thank you for listening to this episode of Museums the Big Issues.
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Join me next Wednesday as we continue to explore the big issues and the big ideas with the people helping to shape the future of museums.
