8
Christine Angel
Gina Marandino
Introduction
How does one take an existing face-to-face museum informatics course that includes in-person museum field trips and redesign it to provide equitable access and flexibility for students within the online learning environment without sacrificing the high quality of discourse and real-world experiences that a traditional face-to-face course provides? One faculty member needed to find a solution to this question when the Division of Library and Information Science (DLIS) program at St. John’s University moved their master’s degree from the face-to-face to the online learning environment.
When the museum informatics course was initially designed, it was constructed for the face-to-face learning environment and included required museum field trips. These field trips were crucial to the course design because they provided students with real-world experiences and knowledge that they need to have when working in the field. As Tuthill and Klemm note, “Field trips help bridge formal and informal learning and prepare students for lifelong learning” (2002, p. 453). The formal learning of the museum field trips aligned with self-assigned student–museum partnership assignments relating to four museum benchmarks. The field trips also provided places of informal learning for students because they were able to observe the organic interactions between and among people, information, and technology within the museum environment.
When the DLIS graduate program moved online, these real-world student–museum interactions were lost. So, the question became one of how to translate these face-to-face student–museum interactions to the online learning environment while maintaining the same amount of student engagement that is traditionally found within a face-to-face course. To resolve the problem, field trips were provided to students using video, with the help of a New Media and Communications Specialist from the University’s Department of Online Learning and Services. The advantage of incorporating video into the museum field trips is that “the quality of interactions among students and the instructor relates less to geographical separation and more to the degree of flexibility in the structure of a course, the degree of dialogue and interactions that take place within it, and the degree of learner autonomy” (M. Moore, cited in Dolan, Kain, Reilly & Bansal, 2017, p. 46).
This chapter first describes the museum informatics course and its corresponding social media tools. The role of the New Media and Communications Specialist is then described along with the digital media tools leveraged when assisting the faculty member in transforming the course for the online learning environment. Examples of barriers encountered, and technologies used to overcome these barriers are then described. Student assignment examples are provided, and the chapter concludes with a summary of student feedback obtained from post-course reflections rela