Online museum: over 450 participants during corona!

For Telemark Museum, corona required a big turn-around. This sparked the idea of creating an online museum. According to Erine Amundal who works at the museum, they were expecting around 1400 pupils for school visits during the spring.

“We realised that we needed to digitalise our program in one way or another. That’s when I thought of SimplyLearn, who I knew had features so we could combine videos and assignments that the pupils could answer.”

Ibsen Labyrinth and The Wild Duck

Telemark Museum began with creating an Ibsen Labyrinth that consisted of a video followed by a quiz. 

They have also created a course about Henrik Ibsen’s famous play, The Wild Duck.

“We created two videos that tell the story, but the pupils don’t know the ending. After the videos, they are asked how they think the story ended. Almost 200 have answered and there are many creative responses! We wouldn’t have had this if they only came visiting, because it would be practically very difficult, especially with that many people.”

The students are well pleased

Over 600 sixth graders were also supposed to come to the museum and learn about the food and class distinctions that existed back in 1910. The museum also digitised this experience for the students.

“We filmed with actors, created a program, and customised it for a digital platform. The course was a lot like originally intended, and the students were given the assignment of cooking at home. The ones who participated in the course are very pleased with it!”

Blended learning

Erine shares that people often come unprepared to a museum. To use blended learning, where there is both something happening online and something happening physically at the museum, is very useful.

“Of course, we want pupils and others to continue to visit us physically, but if they can go through a course online beforehand, they will be a lot more prepared and able to receive new knowledge. We are looking at the possibility to combine digital learning with physical museum visits, and that we can continue to create programs for school classes.”

Online training for summer employees

For the summer season, Telemark Museum has about 40 new employees. They were supposed to be trained during a weekend this spring, but this was canceled due to covid-19.

“We, therefore, created an online training course, and we can track the student’s progression in the course so that we know if they have done it or not.”

Full control with video progression

With SimplyLearn the administrator of the course platform has full control over the progression of each participant, and by using video progression the participants can’t continue in the course before they have watched the whole video. This is was helpful for the employee training course.

“In the future, when we can gather as normal, we can still use the online course. It’s incredibly much they need to learn over that weekend. They can prepare and learn a lot online – and then we can do the most important things when we gather physically.”

So far, more than 460 people have done a course with Telemark Museum at onlinemuseum.no. In addition to that, there have most likely been a number of students who have completed courses in the classroom together with their teacher after the schools started up again.